Imagine being such a trash-ass parent that you exploit your daughter’s wedding with a series of paid and staged photo-ops (but then manage to call out sick for the wedding itself); subsequently leak her private correspondence to the press; later threaten to testify against your own child in her battle for privacy from said press; but ultimately claim victimhood for the bad PR of your own making—since the daughter in question has barely uttered a public word about you in almost two years.
Who does this? Thomas Markle, of course, who’s decided to start the new decade off on that same old shit, sitting down with Britain’s Channel 5 for a six-hour interview about his youngest child Meghan—now Duchess of Sussex—titled Thomas Markle: My Story, which aired in the UK on Wednesday night. This, while Meghan and husband Prince Harry are in the process of formally distancing their young family from exactly this type of exploitation, making the difficult choice to abdicate their royal duties. But as the senior Markle (who appears to have a Marilyn Monroe fixation, but I digress) explains in an excerpt obtained by ET Online, he’s the real victim in this scenario.
“I’m going to defend myself,” he says. “And I’m going to be paid for it. I’m not going to refuse to get paid for it. I’ll do future things and be paid for it, I think. I don’t care. At this point, they owe me. The royals owe me. Harry owes me. Meghan owes me. What I have been through, I should be rewarded for.”
Is your skin crawling yet? Mine is. Again: Who does this?
Ironically, Markle claims he’s speaking out because: “I want everyone to know that I am not all the trashy things that are being said about me...I want Harry and Meghan to see that this is not fair. To them, I don’t exist.”
Hmm...wonder why?
Markle, whose only claim to fame is continuing to ride his daughter’s coattails to relevance, also complains about the damage done to his image—again, due to his own staged photo-ops:
“My clothing were critiqued, the way I looked was critiqued, the things I bought was critiqued,” he says. “Suddenly, I became an alcoholic.”
I don’t know anything about Markle’s drinking habits, but can’t help but notice how Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, seems to have stemmed much of the paparazzi’s initially negative focus upon her—oh, that’s right; she doesn’t actively court the press. But Markle and elder daughter Samantha clearly feel entitled to some overflow of the attention paid to Meghan; as her father sat for Channel 5’s cameras, Samantha (purportedly the marketing genius behind those staged photo-ops) published an op-ed for British outlet The Sun on Monday, claiming her younger sister “chose wealth and fortune over family” and “has ripped through the Royal family like a tornado” (h/t Page Six).
“I am worried that Meghan and Harry will never find true happiness,” Samantha hopes wrote. “They could not find contentment with the Royal Family, will they be able to find it away from them?”
“Their objective is fame and fortune—to be Hollywood,” she also claimed. And what is your objective, Samantha and Thomas?
“My daughter told me that when I reach my senior years, she would take care of me,” Thomas Markle tells Channel 5, noting that he’d helped fund her education (you know, as many parents do). “I’m in my senior years now. I’m 75 years old, so it’s time to look after Daddy.”
Gross.