Meghan Markle’s estranged 81-year-old father Thomas Markle declared Wednesday that he is “fine” after his older daughter raised the alarm that he was trapped on the 19th floor of his apartment building in the Philippines after a deadly 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck the island of Cebu, in the central part of the country.
“Please don’t worry about me, everything is okay,” Thomas Markle said in a statement, according to the Daily Mail. The concern about his well-being was sparked by Samantha Markle, the half sister of the Duchess of Sussex, who posted on social media that her father was unable to leave his apartment after the quake struck Cebu Province on Tuesday night, at about 10 p.m. local time, the Daily Mail said.
Thomas Markle, a former Hollywood lighting designer, relocated to the Philippines earlier this year with his son, Thomas Jr., who is Meghan Markle’s older half-brother and who also is estranged from the Los Angeles-reared duchess.
As the quake left at least 69 people dead across Cebu Province, Samantha Markle announced on social media: “My father is stuck on the 19th floor of a building in the Philippines after a massive earthquake and he can’t walk and he is trapped.”
“As of today he is OK, and making plans to get out of that building,” she also said, according to the New York Post. “They seem to be safe for now, and hopefully there will be no serious aftershocks. Provisions are being made so that he won’t be trapped in a similar situation again. God bless and stay safe everyone!”
The Daily Mail — rather skeptically — wrote that Samantha Markle was vague on details about her father’s situation, while noting that she known for her “erratic behavior” and long-running feud with Meghan. According to the Daily Mail, Samantha Markle she didn’t explain whether her father was alone in his apartment when the earthquake struck, whether the earthquake actually damaged his building or how he was trapped. She also “bizarrely” criticized her famous younger sister for her father’s situation, suggesting that she was somehow responsible. Samantha Markle subsequently made her account private.
Thomas Markle, who has suffered two heart attacks and a stroke in recent years, moved 7,500 miles from his former home in Rosarito, Mexico to the island of Cebu in January. The father and son initially stayed in a three-star hotel before renting their apartment in a high-rise building near a main road, the Daily Mail said. Speaking to the Daily Mail in January about his move to Southeast Asia, Thomas Markle said he was “ready for a change.”
“I have felt stuck in a rut for some time and I am ready to meet new people and experience kindness,” said. “At 80 it is time to go somewhere where the people are lovely and I can enjoy a quieter, friendlier existence.”
Thomas Markle became estranged from his former TV actor daughter in the aftermath of her May 2018 royal wedding to Prince Harry. Shortly before the wedding, Thomas Markle was revealed to have worked with tabloid photographers to stage photos of himself preparing to attend his daughter’s globally televised wedding in the U.K. and to walk her down the aisle. But amid the controversy over the photos, Thomas Markle backed out of attending the wedding, as he said he also had to go into the hospital for emergency heart surgery.
Both Thomas and Samantha Markle began to speak out against Meghan, accusing her of being a social climber who turned her back on them after she married into the British royal family. It didn’t go unnoticed among royal observers that Meghan never arranged for Harry to meet Thomas Markle before the wedding and that she had no family members in attendance, just celebrities like George and Amal Clooney, whom she didn’t even know.
It’s been widely reported that Thomas Markle, however flawed a person he might be, devoted himself to Meghan’s upbringing in Los Angeles after he divorced her mother, Doria Ragland. Meghan reportedly lived with him for at least part of her childhood, and he paid for her private-school education and her tuition at Northwestern University.
In more recent years, Thomas Markle has lamented that he has never met his grandchildren, Archie and Lilibet, even after Meghan and Harry left the U.K. in 2020 and settled in Montecito, California, about 250 miles away.