Here's How The Invasive Press Reportedly Drove A Wedge Between Meghan & Her Family

Meghan Markle has been dealing with headline-making family drama for years. Ahead of her May 2018 wedding to Prince Harry, her dad, Thomas Markle, was caught staging paparazzi photos, and things have only escalated from there. These new details about Meghan Markle's family from Finding Freedom are so intense.

Thomas and Meghan's sister, Samantha, have been speaking to media without her consent since news of Meghan and Harry's engagement broke in November 2017. In a passage from Finding Freedom, Meghan reportedly told a friend her father was triggered by the media. "He’s vulnerable," she said. "He’s been baited. A lot of the tabloid journalists have been coaxing him and paying him. I don’t know if he really even had a chance."

Even though Meghan and Harry didn't write the book, Thomas, who suffered a heart attack and missed Meghan and Harry's wedding, wasn't thrilled after finding out what his daughter reportedly said. "This is the worst time in the world for [Meghan and Harry] to be whining and complaining about anything," Thomas told The Sun. "Because people everywhere are suffering due to the coronavirus pandemic."

Now that Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s royal biography has hit bookshelves and online retailers, more reported details about the Markle family have emerged. One part of the book details Meghan's "embarrassment" after her father's staged photo ops ahead of her wedding day.

According to the book, Meghan wrote her father a handwritten letter asking him to stop working with the press, and he issued a lengthy reply. In a four-page letter of his own, Thomas requested his daughter do a photo op for the press with him and Prince Harry. Elite Daily reached out to Meghan's rep regarding the book's claims but did not hear back by the time of publication.

“I’m devastated,” Meghan told a friend at the time, according to the book. “My father’s clearly been fully corrupted.”

In one chapter, "The Thomas Markle Situation," Scobie and Durand detailed how Meghan practically begged her father to attend her May 2018 wedding. Despite Meghan’s endless voicemails and texts, her father refused to get in the car to the airport that day, and didn't respond to Meghan's messages. “My God, my phone,” Meghan apparently told a friend, adding that she’d called Thomas at least twenty times.

Finding Freedom also shared details of Meghan's earliest childhood memories with her father.

"From the time she was a little girl her father had doted on her," the book explained, detailing the time Thomas created an interracial Barbie family for his daughter one Christmas, as well as the times he helped out with set design for Meghan's many school plays. It was memories like this, which made Meghan so willing to forgive her father, the book claims. “As much as she was hurt and humiliated, she wanted him to be there and was willing to move on,” a close friend told the authors. The book also detailed Meghan's sympathy for her father who she reportedly claims was "baited" by tabloid press. "I don't know if he really even had a chance," she told a friend.

Thomas wasn't the only member of Meghan's family who rocked the boat. Her half-sister Samantha Markle did just the same. The book's chapter "A Problem Like Samantha" reflected on Sam's ploys to gain notoriety and money as a result of being the Duchess' half-sister.

One confidant explained, “In the beginning, what Samantha was trying to create was this Kate and Pippa dynamic, like those close siblings, but that’s not the case. Meg didn’t grow up with Samantha. She barely saw her." And while Sam reportedly told Meghan she would stop conducting tabloid interviews if Meghan were to contact her, The Duchess reportedly never did so out of fear her sister would tape the phone call and sell it.