Meghan Markle’s estranged father Thomas today denied his daughter’s claims to Oprah that he had ‘betrayed’ her before branding his son-in-law Harry ‘snotty’ and accusing him of failing to properly support her when she was suicidal.
He said: ‘We all make mistakes – but I’ve never played naked pool or dressed like Hitler like Harry did’.
And in a further attack on Harry, Mr Markle said that his daughter’s admission she was suicidal while living in the UK reflected badly on his son-on-law.
He said: ‘It really did upset me, like I said, it would have been easy for her to reach out to me, any of the rest of her family, who she claims she doesn’t know. But the other thing is that I would think that she could turn to her husband.’ When noted she did speak to Harry, Mr Markle said Meghan’s husband Harry had ‘obviously not supported her that well’.
Mr Markle than slammed his daughter’s decision to refuse to see or speak to him, Mr Markle said: ‘The biggest problem here is she’s pretty much ghosted all of her family’.
The 76-year-old also denied the Royal Family – or Britain – is racist, saying if it is true an unnamed royal asked about how ‘dark’ Archie’s skin would be, it was probably just a ‘dumb question’, before calling Meghan and Harry’s claims ‘bulls**t’.
He spoke to Good Morning Britain in the UK after watching the Oprah interview with his daughter and her husband, which was watched by 11.1million in Britain last night and tens of millions more when it was shown by CBS in the US on Sunday.
In it Meghan said she could not fathom hurting her son Archie in the way her own father ‘betrayed’ her, admitting she ‘found it hard to reconcile’ with Thomas. She said: ‘I look at Archie, I think about this child, and I genuinely can’t imagine doing anything to intentionally cause pain to my child’.
Mr Markle said that while he did let her down, she had ‘let me down too’ by cutting him off after heart surgery almost three years ago. He said: ‘The bottom line is she didn’t lose me, she made a statement saying she lost me, she didn’t lose me, I would’ve always been there for her, I’m there for her now if she wants me’. He added: ‘We all make mistakes – but I’ve never played naked pool or dressed like Hitler like Harry did’.
Mr Markle was referencing Harry’s decision to wear a Nazi uniform to a party when he was 20 and seven years later in 2012 the prince was photographed wearing nothing but a necklace with a naked female playmate hiding behind him having just played a game of strip pool in his VIP Las Vegas hotel suite.
Describing his last phone call with Harry after heart surgery in May 2018, Mr Markle said: ‘Harry had said to me if you had listened to me, this wouldn’t have happened to you. Me, laying in a hospital bed after a having procedure, I had a stent put here and put here [points at his heart] and that was kind of snotty so I hung up on him.’
But Mr Markle also used the rare interview to urge his daughter to reach out to him. He said: ‘I’d like to say again. I’m sorry for what I’ve done. This was two years ago. But I’ve tried to make it up to her. I’m now only 70 miles away. I’ve never stopped loving her. I don’t agree with all the things that my children they do. But I will always love them. And I certainly love Meghan’.
The GMB show had already made headlines before Mr Markle spoke when host Piers Morgan walked off set live on air after being criticised by weatherman Alex Beresford who accused Mr Morgan of unfairly ‘trashing’ Meghan Markle.
Thomas Markle’s first words on the Oprah interview came as:
