Thomas Markle’s granddaughter: ‘Something was always off about grandpa’

Noelle Rasmussen is standing in front of the sunset-lit foothills of Albuquerque, New Mexico, as the light begins to fade on a crisp autumn evening.

The city is where she grew up and still lives to this day, a world away from the royal pomp and pageantry which her aunt, Meghan (formerly Markle), the Duchess of Sussex, married into in 2018.

The London Telegraph spoke to her just five days after her grandfather Thomas Markle was accused of serious offences against children in the Philippines.

“Maybe it was a vibe that I subconsciously got … something’s not right about a person, and you don’t actively register it. But your body tells you when something’s off,” she says of her few experiences with him as a child.

“Hundreds, if not thousands” of child abuse images were allegedly found at Markle’s home in the South-East Asian archipelago by Meghan’s half-brother, Thomas Markle jnr, who reported his father to the police.

Markle snr denies abusing underage girls and possessing the images. He has not been charged.

In 2019, Rasmussen’s grandmother Roslyn Loveless, who was Thomas Markle snr’s first wife, wrote a letter to the Metropolitan Police sharing concerns about Meghan and Prince Harry’s safety and accusing her former husband of being a paedophile.

In the letter, Loveless, who died in 2024, alleged that Markle snr told her he went to the Philippines and Thailand “because 12-year-olds are legal there”. Meghan was made aware of the allegations and chose to limit contact with her father.

Back in New Mexico, the news has sent ripples through the Markle family.

“It’s a disturbing allegation for everybody involved and everybody reading it. Nobody likes to hear things like that,” Rasmussen told the Telegraph, adding she was glad that her uncle was “whistleblowing”.

For Rasmussen, one of the most troubling aspects of the case is the suggestion that her grandmother’s warning to the Metropolitan Police was ignored.

Scotland Yard admitted they failed to pass the letter to the FBI or foreign police forces for investigation, although they did tell Meghan about the accusations.

“It blows my mind [that it wasn’t passed over to the FBI],” Rasmussen says. “That is a failure on the police’s part ... that is such a failure of the system. It’s embarrassing.”

Growing up, Rasmussen rarely saw her grandfather, assuming it was simply because he lived so far away. Her grandmother made no secret of her dislike for him, frequently referring to him in decidedly unflattering terms as “that f------ a------“, she recalls with a smile.

At the time, Rasmussen did not understand the depth of her grandmother’s hostility. Now, she finds herself re-examining those childhood memories.

“I remember her writing the letter,” she says. With hindsight, it would “make a puzzle piece kind of fit”, into the story of her own childhood.

“She had guts that I’ve never seen before, and she did not care what would come to her. She would just do whatever she felt was right, and she was incredible.”

When Rasmussen was 16, Loveless wrote to the police and Child Protective Services demanding that she be removed from the care of her daughter. Rasmussen claims that her mother, Samantha Markle, was emotionally and physically abusive. It is a period she remembers as “hell”.

In 2019, Samantha Markle told The Sun that her daughter’s allegations of abuse were not true, claiming a court found there was no evidence. She could not be reached for comment by the Telegraph.

“[My grandmother] always knew who to go to. The police got involved, my dad came and picked me up, and I went for the weekend. I didn’t go back,” she says.

Samantha Markle, 61, has defended her father, suggesting her mother’s accusations were born out of “hatred and bitterness”. She has also questioned Loveless’s credibility, describing her as an alcoholic.

‘She just spoke the truth’

Rasmussen strongly rejects this characterisation of her grandmother. “Roslyn liked her drinks. We all like our drinks. Who doesn’t like a drink?” she says. “But she was extremely coherent. She was very well-spoken.”

“If she put something in a letter, it’s more than likely what she had seen to be the truth or what she had experienced,” Rasmussen says. “It was something that she either saw or heard or believed to be 100 per cent true.”

‘It doesn’t surprise me. The more I think about it, it just doesn’t.’

Noelle Rasmussen on the allegations against her grandfather, Thomas Markle

She insists her grandmother was not someone who would invent allegations to damage another person’s reputation. “She just spoke the truth, no matter how ugly it was, and if she thought something was ugly, she would absolutely make a scene of it.”

Rasmussen believes that had Loveless known her letter hadn’t been passed on to overseas law enforcement, she would have been furious.

She would “absolutely” have wanted an investigation to take place, her granddaughter says. The failure by the Metropolitan Police, who, according to The Times, subsequently lost the letter, “needs to be looked into”, she adds.

Meghan was reportedly “upset and frustrated” after the London force admitted it had failed to act on the sex abuse allegations against her father.

‘Not safe’ around children

In 2025, Markle snr was forced to return to the United States from the Philippines for a leg amputation following a blood clot. Meghan wrote to him while he was in hospital, claiming that it was not safe to have him around children, and saying that he would never meet Archie and Lilibet. She urged him to seek professional help.

Rasmussen has also had to come to terms with the difficult realisation that she cannot rule out the possibility that her grandfather attacked members of her family. She says she was never abused by Markle herself.

“I’m glad that I had never been victimised or had the chance to be victimised,” she says. “I don’t think he would attack family, but when you do not know what somebody’s capable of, you can’t assume.”

Nor, she says, was news of his alleged child abuse a revelation.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” she says. “The more and more I think about it, it just doesn’t … I don’t know why it’s not a surprise.”

Perhaps, she reflects, it was something she couldn’t put into words. “It might have been something I just didn’t register at the time, or subconsciously put any thought behind.

“Even as a child, it may have just been something that I registered that I didn’t know [I had].”

She ultimately believes her grandmother must have protected her from her grandfather.

“She loved to protect people, and if she loved you, she would go to the ends of the earth to protect you. And so that was more than likely,” she says.

Although Rasmussen has not spoken to Meghan for years, she supports her aunt’s decision to keep her children away from their grandfather, saying she would make the same choice herself.

“I support her decision to prevent her kids from seeing him. I wouldn’t want my kids around somebody who was being accused of child molestation,” she says.

She adds that she “100 per cent backs” Meghan’s decision to keep Archie and Lilibet away from him.

The Telegraph, London

National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service
1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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