How did Mail on Sunday’s US editor become ‘rock solid friend’ of Meghan’s father?

2025-12-13 15:00

When Thomas Markle received bad news about his health earlier this month, he immediately texted someone close to him to let them know. The 81-year-old had been admitted to hospital after one leg swelled up and turned black. “Going to lose the leg today,” he wrote.

The message was not sent to his son, Thomas, who lives with him in Cebu in the Philippines, nor to his older daughter, Samantha, who is based in Florida. Instead, Markle contacted Caroline Graham, the US editor of the Mail on Sunday, who is based in Los Angeles. It was she who called Markle’s two older children to let them know the news. She wrote later that they were “flabbergasted”.

“He had chosen to break the news of the amputation to me before his own family.”

Markle’s youngest child, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, would learn of her father’s health crisis “through news coverage”, Graham reported coyly several days after the operation, after she had flown to the Philippines to be by his bedside. “However, Mr Markle last night said he has not heard from Meghan ‘but would love to speak to her’.”

Few dysfunctional families would find harmony under the close scrutiny of the tabloid press, as British royals have known for half a century and more. For the past eight years, since Meghan’s relationship with Prince Harry became public, that has been the story of the Markles, in which the toxic swirl of the past week is merely the latest unedifying chapter.

Meghan, having heard of his ill health last week, had been trying to reach her father, her spokesperson said, but “given that a Daily Mail reporter has remained at her father’s bedside throughout, broadcasting each interaction and breaching clear ethical boundaries, it has been exceedingly difficult for the duchess to contact her father privately, despite her efforts over the past several days”.

If Meghan had emailed, her father had not received it, wrote Graham. Eventually, the duchess’s spokesperson said she had written him a letter and “with the support of reliable and trusted contacts, her correspondence is now safely in his hands”.

Before Meghan married Prince Harry in 2018, the former actor and her father, a retired lighting director in the TV industry, were reportedly on reasonable, if distant terms. Meghan’s father, then living in Mexico, was in effect a “recluse”, his son told the Mail in late 2017. “I haven’t seen him in years. He hates the attention Meghan’s romance has brought on to him. He loves her but hates the idea of being in the spotlight.”

Thanks to the charms of sections of the press, he appears to have come round to the idea. Thomas, who separated from Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, when the future duchess was two, had initially been due to walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding, but at the last minute she announced he would no longer be attending, amid reports of a heart attack – and after he had posed for staged paparazzi photos.

A five-page letter written by Meghan to her father after the wedding was leaked by her father to the Mail on Sunday the following year. “I have to defend myself,” he told Graham. Meghan successfully sued the newspaper over invasion of privacy.

Father and daughter have had little contact since, which has not led to any less interest in his views. In 2020, Thomas filmed a documentary in which he said: “The royals owe me, Harry owes me, Meghan owes me. What I have been through, I should be rewarded for.”

Having lost touch with one daughter, he appears to have acquired another, of sorts. Having “met through work”, Graham wrote that she and Thomas had been “rock solid friends” since 2018. “We speak most days and I consider him a father figure.” DMG Media, the parent company of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, has denied Meghan’s accusation that the relationship breaches journalistic ethics.

“As well as being a journalist, Caroline has been friends with Mr Markle since 2018. She has been with Mr Markle in hospital every day, providing him with care and support … The suggestion that Caroline has breached ethical boundaries is demonstrably false and vehemently denied,” said a spokesperson.

The publisher will face a lawsuit from Prince Harry and others in the new year over allegations of illegal information gathering, which it denies.

For now, the family agrees. Meghan’s half-brother, Thomas Jr, said this week that Graham would remain the trusted conduit for his father’s health updates: “I trust her, she’s doing a great job, she’s never thrown anybody in the family under the bus … That is where your news is going to come from.”