Either the duchess believed the letter that detailed allegations about her father and lied to Oprah, or she didn’t, and last week was opportunism, writes Tom Sykes.

Undeterred by the unsavory claims swirling around her father, Meghan has just launched a $550 “Library basket” in her product line, As Ever, and announced she is filming a series of MasterChef Australia (hinting that her children could go with her).

This is while her staff is simultaneously telling friendly outlets that she has fled the U.K. to cope with the trauma of the revelations (which just happens to coincide with British schools being out for a week) and that she keeps bursting into tears whenever she looks at her daughter Lilibet and thinks of the allegations around her father.

Thomas Markle, 82, was reported to police in the Philippines by his own son for allegedly owning a vast hoard of child sex abuse images. He denies all the claims, calling them “sick lies” and “the worst thing anyone could accuse me of.”

Hearing your father accused of such a thing must be unbelievably painful. But one can’t help but wonder how Meghan (and, to a lesser extent, Harry) handled the events of the last week, and what the public verdict is. The answer so far looks grim: if possible, people are even more furious and disgusted with Meghan than before. And this time, they can’t blame the mainstream media, which have by and large reverted to parroting the Sussex line.

Meghan’s people have made it clear she was not sexually abused by her father herself. This has also changed the context of her inaction over her stated conviction that her father was a danger to her children: many survivors of sexual abuse have contacted me to say that they are revolted that Meghan never followed up on the accusations to protect other children if she really and truly believed the allegations from the outset, as she has spent all week vehemently suggesting she does.

This story really begins with an accusatory letter, allegedly sent to the police in January 2019 from Thomas’s first wife, Roslyn Loveless, whom he divorced in 1979, in which she informed British police that Thomas had told her he traveled to the Philippines for legal sex with children (the legal age of consent in that country was, at the time, 12). A copy of the handwritten letter, we are told, was passed to Meghan and Harry via their police bodyguards.

According to Meghan’s statement, they reacted to the note by cutting off all contact with her father. She said last week: “In 2018, a letter was sent to the Metropolitan Police and Royalty and Specialist Protection. That letter was subsequently shared with me. It made troubling and disturbing allegations against my father and I was given assurances that these were being investigated.

“I hope it can now be understood that, despite certain media publications’ distortion over the years, any distance from my father and my choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them.”

It then emerged that the police had lost the letter so thoroughly that they had to go to the Sussexes and ask for a copy, which Meghan duly produced. Her office said she is a great “record keeper.”

So then a copy of this letter goes back to the Met, who then say it was actually sent in 2019. At this point Meghan’s legendary record-keeping collapses, and she has to correct her dates, with her spokesman saying: “In recalling events from more than seven years ago, without the benefit of a diary entry or contemporaneous record, it is understandable that she may have been mistaken by a few months. If the MPS holds a time-stamped record confirming that the letter was reviewed in 2019, that should be treated as the accurate reference point for when it was received and shared with the Duchess.”

You can understand why people are feeling rather skeptical about this letter at this stage. Given its importance to Meghan’s narrative, and its complicated provenance, it would probably be a good idea for Meghan and Harry to publish it, because it seems to me we are being asked to take an awful lot on trust, and Meghan’s history of truthfulness and veracity is abysmal (just ask the archbishop of Canterbury). It feels like someone going, “I have this letter which proves everything I am saying, but I’m not going to show it to you; I’m just going to read out some bits of it to you.”

The fact that neither the cops nor Meghan followed up on it suggests to many that both dismissed it at the time as the irrelevant and embittered scrawlings of an ex. Meghan may have decided to keep it safe, however, as a smoking gun to produce after Thomas was dead, when he could no longer sue her over the allegations, to justify cutting him off. The Sun’s reporting of Thomas’ alleged crimes, in this reading, merely advanced the timeline for (partial) publication and allowed a convenient symbiosis of shared aims between these two once-sworn enemies.