Meghan Markle has “reached out” to her sick father after a 7-year feud, a spokesperson for the Duchess of Sussex told Newsweek.
The pair have not spoken since 2018 when they fell out over Thomas Markle, 81, staging pictures with the paparazzi for money in the days leading up to her wedding to Prince Harry. He has never seen his grandchildren, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
In the last few days though, Thomas Markle was rushed to hospital in the Philippines and had his leg amputated following a blood clot, the Daily Mail reported.
It is not known whether Meghan’s attempt to contact her father was successful or not, but if this does result in a conversation between them it will have smoothed over a bitter feud which at one point saw Markle threaten to do a media interview about his daughter every month until she agreed to speak to him again.
A spokesperson for the Duchess of Sussex said in a statement to Newsweek and others: “I can confirm she has reached out to her father.”
Thomas Markle’s Ill Health
Markle had emergency surgery on Thursday night to remove a leg after doctors found a blood clot and is not out of the woods yet, his son Tom Markle Jr. told the Daily Mail.
“My dad is being very brave,” he said. “His foot turned blue and then black. It happened very quickly. I took him to a local hospital and they did some scans and an ultrasound and said the leg had to be amputated.
“There was no option. I was told the leg had to be removed and it was a case of life or death.”
The newspaper reported he needs another operation to remove a blood clot from his left thigh and is currently in intensive care in a stable condition.
“One of his doctors said the next two or three days are critical,” Markle Jr. said. “His left leg has been removed below the knee. They were worried about infection setting in—sepsis or gangrene. The flesh was black and dying.”
This is not Markle’s first health problem, in fact he had two heart attacks in the run-up to Meghan’s wedding at the time of the paparazzi photo scandal, which was publicly exposed after The Mail on Sunday pulled CCTV footage of him staging the photos near his home, then in Mexico.
He also experienced a stroke in May 2022 as he was preparing to travel to Britain for Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee.
Meghan’s Estrangement From Thomas Markle
One of the biggest moments in their estrangement came when Meghan sent Markle a letter in summer 2018 begging him to stop speaking to the media about her.
Markle kept it for months but when a group of Meghan’s friends gave anonymous interviews to People in February 2019, one mentioned the letter and described it as an olive branch.
Her father then past it to The Mail on Sunday and the newspaper printed it alongside an interview with him, in which he refuted the characterization it had been a peace offering.
Meghan sued the publisher of the MoS for breach of privacy and copyright at the High Court, in London, and won but only after a reputationally bruising experience.
At one point, the duchess was bounced into apologizing to the Court of Appeal after it emerged she had authorized an aide to brief the author’s of biography Finding Freedom, by Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand. Her lawyers had said she did not contribute to the book.
Past emails were also handed to the court showing Meghan told the same aide, Kensington Palace press secretary Jason Knauf: “Given I’ve only ever called him ‘Daddy’ it may make sense to open [the letter] as such (despite him being less than paternal), and in the unfortunate event that it leaked it would pull at the heartstrings.”
Thomas Markle’s Media Interviews
In 2018, Thomas Markle told The Sun Meghan had cut off all contact with him: “The phone number that I call doesn’t work anymore.
“The, I guess, liaison with the royal family never answers back, and there’s no address I can write to so I have no way of contacting my daughter.”
“I’m not blaming Harry or anyone but they are following rules that don’t make sense to me,” he continued. “They are no less human than anybody else. God knows, I feel sorry for them, for not being able to show emotion. The reason I am being shunned is because I made a profit on the staged pictures.”
Newsweek understands Meghan has previously tried to reach out to Markle before, seemingly unsuccessfully.
His first media interview was June, a month after the wedding, when he told Sky News: “Harry asked for her hand over the phone and I said: ‘You are a gentleman, promise me you will never raise your hand against my daughter and of course I will grant you my permission.'”
As time past though, his comments became more hostile. In September 2023, he made one of a number of pleas to meet his grandchildren in an interview with Good Morning Britain: “I still haven’t seen my grandkids. I want to see my grandkids and I think the king should see his grandkids as well.”
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” he continued. “There’s nothing that says I’m a bad guy. As a matter of fact, I’m a really loving father, and she knows that, and there’s no excuse for her to treat me this way.”
At one point, he also offered to give evidence on behalf of his daughter Samantha Markle, Meghan’s half sister, in a libel lawsuit Samantha filed against Meghan.
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Updates: 12/5/25, 5:09 p.m. ET: This article was updated with new information and remarks.