Lynda Eckhart

Thomas Markle was arrested by the FBI today at his care home in Lakeland, Florida. One federal count of possessing child sexual abuse material. Up to 20 years. Read what the affidavit says, because it is worse than anyone guessed. Two storage units in Los Angeles, rented since 2008, the last payment made by auto-pay last month. Seventy-eight items: slides, negatives, books. Among them, photographs the FBI says show a man a witness identified as Markle himself with a naked prepubescent girl. Another taken in what appears to be a motel in the Philippines. In Cebu, investigators say they have recovered about 7,500 images and a video, children as young as ten. He says it is all sick lies. He is presumed innocent, and he will get every protection the law allows. The children in those slides got none of them. Now the part nobody wants to talk about. Those units were rented in 2008. If what is in them is what the FBI says, it sat there for eighteen years. For nearly seven of those years, a letter about him sat in Scotland Yard and in the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The Met has admitted it told no other police force on earth. Meghan says she was assured it was being handled and, in her own words, trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families. Trusted. For nearly seven years. Did anybody ring to ask? The Met says it told nobody. Her statement does not say she asked. She knew enough to keep her own children away from him. By last December, according to The Sun on Sunday, she knew enough to write and tell him she had been told he abused young children. She knew enough to have a source in The Sun within hours of the story breaking, explaining that people would now finally understand her. Nothing she has said suggests that in all that time she, or anyone acting for her, picked up a phone to someone who could have opened a storage unit in Los Angeles. She trusted. The children in those slides needed more than trust. That is not a crime. Nobody is saying it is. But it is the difference between protecting your children and protecting children, and today we found out which one it was. The person who did the right thing was her brother. He found the boxes, swore an affidavit, called the FBI, and got called a liar by his father and a grifter by half of this app for his trouble. The FBI said today that these cases turn on the public coming forward, even when it is a family member. It did. An 82-year-old man will now answer in a courtroom in Tampa. A duchess should answer one question in public. What did you do with what you knew?