The Negatives: What the Case Against Thomas Markle Can Reach, and What It Cannot
Robert Nogacki, Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec, November 6, 2026
On Friday, November 6, 2026, agents of the F.B.I. walked into a senior-living facility in Lakeland, Florida, and arrested Thomas Markle, eighty-two years old, the father of Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. The day before, a federal judge in Los Angeles had signed a criminal complaint with a single count: possession of child pornography, punishable by up to twenty years in prison. From two storage units in the Los Angeles area, which Markle had rented since 2008 and paid for by automatic debit as recently as October, the Bureau removed seventy-eight items: slides, film negatives, books. On some of the digitized negatives, the agent swore, a fully clothed adult man poses with naked little girls, in one image touching the child in a way the affidavit describes without euphemism, and a witness who has known Markle since the nineteen-seventies identified the man as Markle. The thirteen pages of the agent’s affidavit say less about Thomas Markle than the headlines suggest, and more than anyone would care to know about how criminal law works when the past is long out of reach.
The Scanner
On November 2, 2026, at the F.B.I.’s Los Angeles field office, a special agent from the Violent Crimes Against Children unit fed strips of thirty-five-millimetre negatives, seized days earlier from a storage unit in the area, into a Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED. The VueScan software subtracted the orange mask that every color negative carries and showed the picture, as the agent wrote, “as it was originally captured.” The agent’s name is redacted. The agent’s tenure is not: he has been with the Bureau since August, 2025. The same affidavit assures the court that “during my career” he has led and taken part in numerous investigations of this kind. The F.B.I. career is fifteen months old.
He identified some eighteen images that, in his judgment, constitute child pornography, and described three. All show naked girls who have not reached puberty. Two also show an adult man in a white button-down shirt and blue jeans, fully clothed, somewhere, the agent estimates, between his thirties and his forties. On November 5th, the agent showed those two pictures, cropped so that only the man was visible, to a witness who has known Markle since the seventies. The witness identified Markle. The agent adds that, in boxes from the same unit, he found further photographs in which, he believes, the same man poses with children “in various stages of undress.” He gives no further detail, and rightly so. None will be given here.
Then the document does something that may amuse a reader unaccustomed to American affidavits and surprises no American lawyer at all. In footnotes, the agent states that “based on my training and experience” he knows the Eastman Kodak Company to be an American firm from Rochester, New York, and The Philippine Star to be a major English-language daily. The formula is not decoration. In a federal courtroom, “training and experience” is the incantation that converts what an agent knows into probable cause: a judge may rely on the agent’s inferences only if the agent shows where they came from. The courts guard this jealously. In 1990, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, whose territory includes California, threw out a search warrant in United States v. Weber that rested on a generic “profile” of the pedophile and collector, because nothing in the record tied the defendant to the profile. The opinion contains a sentence worth keeping: “Virtual certainty becomes probability, which merges into possibility, which fades into chance.”
Whether by design or by habit, the author of the complaint against Markle stays on the right side of Weber. In the version of the affidavit the Justice Department posted, there is not a word of psychology: no “collector,” no “offender characteristics,” no prediction. There are objects, dates, warrant numbers, a code on the edge of the film, and a logo on a pillow. The F.B.I.’s director, Kash Patel, spoke that day, in a statement, of children whose innocence had been stolen; in thirteen pages the agent used not a single moral adjective. That is the first paradox of the case. The document on which the charge rests says nothing about the man. It talks about the box.
What the Judge Signed
A criminal complaint is one of the two ways a federal prosecution can begin (the other is a grand-jury indictment): a form with a one-sentence count and, attached, an agent’s sworn affidavit, which a magistrate judge reads for probable cause. It is more than its Polish counterpart, the decision to present charges that a prosecutor issues on his own authority, because a court approves it, and less than an indictment, because within thirty days of the arrest a grand jury must return one, or the charge is dismissed, though the statute’s exclusions and the possibility of recharging make that less final than it sounds. Judge Rozella A. Oliver signed the complaint in Los Angeles on November 5th. In doing so, she performed a ritual that, in this category of cases, carries real weight: she viewed the three images described, placed them in an envelope, sealed it, and initialled across the seal. The agent will keep the envelope “until all appeals have been exhausted.” The judge did not rely on the description. She looked.
Why that matters is explained by how the description is built. The agent does not write “this is pornography.” He writes that the “focal point” of the image is the child’s nudity, that the setting is one “associated with sexual activity,” that the pose is “unnatural,” that it “suggests sexual coyness” and “appears designed to elicit a sexual response in the viewer.” This is not prose. It is a checklist. In 1986, a federal court in San Diego, in United States v. Dost, laid down six questions, among others that may be relevant, for deciding whether a child’s nudity in a picture amounts to the “lascivious exhibition” the statute requires: whether the genitals are the focal point, whether the setting is sexually suggestive, whether the pose is unnatural for the age, whether the child is naked, whether the image suggests sexual willingness, and whether it is designed to elicit a response in the viewer. The agent answers them in order, for each of the three images, in words that are nearly the court’s own. There is one wrinkle a trial lawyer will notice: Dost itself observed that a child of tender years is presumably incapable of sexual coyness, which did not stop the agent from borrowing the phrase. The affidavit is written for the judge who must sign it, and written so that signing is the safest decision available to her. (How judges decide is the subject of an earlier essay of mine, “First the Hunch, Then the Law”.)
Three federal prosecutors have their names on the complaint, among them the chief of the office’s ethics, trials, and compliance section; on a single count, that reads as a signal of rank. Because Markle was arrested in Florida, he appeared on Friday afternoon before a federal court in Tampa, which in such cases handles the preliminaries: identity, counsel, and whether the defendant waits for his transfer to California in custody. Late in the day, Magistrate Judge Thomas Wilson released him on his own recognizance, under home detention with an electronic monitor, barred from travelling beyond the Middle District of Florida and the Central District of California. No plea was taken. The trial, if there is one, will be in Los Angeles.
There is one count, but it has a ratchet. Possession of child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(5)(B) carries up to ten years, unless at least one image depicts a prepubescent child or a child under twelve, in which case the ceiling rises to twenty. Hence the agent repeats the word “pre-pubescent” for every image and supports it anatomically. One word doubles the statutory maximum. For comparison, in Poland, where I practice, possessing pornographic material involving a minor (Article 202, § 4a, of the Penal Code) is punishable by three months to five years, and recording it (§ 4) by one year to ten. The sentence “he faces twenty years” does not translate into European intuitions about the weight of a charge; the American scale for the material alone is a separate world, built over two decades by amendments, each of which moved in only one direction.
Markle denies the allegations. In October he told the Daily Mail that the accusations from the Philippines were “sick lies” and that he had no knowledge of the material. The presumption of innocence protects him as it protects anyone, and a criminal complaint is a one-sided document: it collects what supports the charge and nothing else.
Why “Possession,” When the Agent Implies Something Worse
The most interesting thing about the complaint is what is not in it. The agent writes that the man in the pictures is Markle and that, in further photographs, the same man poses with undressed children. Every reader understands what that means. Yet the prosecution charges neither the production of child pornography (18 U.S.C. § 2251) nor the sexual abuse of children. It charges possession, and possession “on or about October 30, 2026,” the date of the first search warrant. The date is not incidental. Possession is a continuing offense: it is committed every day its owner knowingly keeps the negative in the box. Making a photograph is a crime committed once, on the day the shutter is pressed. And that day, by every indication, was a long time ago.
How long is the question the complaint does not answer. The agent dates the pictures only in passing, and in pieces. On a pillow in the background of the third image, the one without the man, he read the logo of “Anahaw Lodge,” a motel chain founded in the Philippines by Angelo King, who, according to the Philippine Star article the affidavit cites, changed the landscape of the country’s motel industry in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. The man in the first two images is in his thirties or forties; Thomas Markle was born in July, 1944, so if the identification holds, those two were taken somewhere between the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties. The film stock points backward too, without saying how far. A motel’s heyday is not a date stamp, and the affidavit does not claim it is. Decades old, then, but which decade is unknown. And in this corner of the law, the decade is everything.
Federal law once gave most crimes a five-year limitations period (18 U.S.C. § 3282). Only in 1990 did Congress extend it, for sex offenses against children, to the victim’s twenty-fifth birthday; in 2003, to the victim’s lifetime; and in 2006, with the Adam Walsh Act, it abolished the limit for that category altogether (18 U.S.C. § 3299). Each of those changes reached only offenses whose clock was still running. A period that has expired cannot be revived: the Supreme Court said so in 2003, in Stogner v. California, striking down a California law that tried to resurrect time-barred child-abuse prosecutions. But a clock that was still running when the extension arrived keeps running under the new rule, which is why a federal appeals court in 2005 let the prosecution of abuse committed in the late eighties go forward. The ladder cuts both ways. For images from the seventies or the early eighties, the door shut for good before any extension existed. For images from the late eighties onward, it may never have closed. Polish law knows the same mechanics. Article 101, § 4, of our Penal Code now forbids the limitation period for sexual offenses against a minor from running out before the victim turns forty (the threshold was thirty until October, 2023), and the 2022 amendment that raised it applies the new rule to earlier acts “unless the limitation period has already expired.” One may lengthen a clock that is ticking; one may not restart one that has stopped. (That criminal law expands in one direction only is the subject of an earlier piece of mine, “The Boomerang: How Instruments of Repression Turn on Their Makers.”)
That, most likely, is why the charge is possession, and the complaint gives no reason at all: possession is the one offense that can be proved from the boxes without first proving a date. If the pictures are as old as the motel’s heyday suggests, the law does not reach the room at Anahaw Lodge; it reaches a box labelled “Tom Markle” in a storage unit outside Los Angeles. If they are younger, a production charge may yet follow, once dates, identities, and places are established, and the agent is careful to say the investigation is active. This needs saying plainly, because the headlines do not say it: the charge of “possession” is not the prosecution’s leniency. It is what the prosecution could prove on November 5th, with the calendar left for later.
There is a second reason the complaint busies itself with the edge of the film rather than its content. A federal charge under this provision requires a hook into interstate or foreign commerce; otherwise the matter would belong to the State of California. The agent read, along the edge of the negatives, the marking “K·ODAK CP 100 594,” and from the position of the dot between the K and the O, using a guide Kodak published in 2013, he inferred that the film was manufactured in New York or Colorado, and therefore travelled to California. A diligent defense lawyer will open the guide. It concerns motion-picture film, while the negatives come from a still camera, and its plant-of-origin table assigns the dot between K and O to Rochester alone; Colorado’s dot sits between the D and the A. The agent’s reading is loose, and the conclusion survives it: both plants are a long way from California. A diligent prosecutor will add the pillow: if the picture was taken in the Philippines and the negative sat in California, it made its journey through foreign commerce, and that suffices.
The investigation, the agent cautions, “is active and ongoing,” and the review of the seventy-eight items is not finished. In the Philippines, meanwhile, police have counted some seventy-five hundred photographs and one video on devices linked to Markle, and the interior secretary, Jonvic Remulla, announced on November 5th that Thomas Markle, Jr., who turned those devices over to the authorities himself, is a “person of interest,” though not a suspect. On November 1st, Mexican authorities searched a storage unit rented in Markle’s name near Rosarito. Should traces turn up anywhere of sexual conduct abroad after 2003, the statute on Americans’ illicit sexual conduct in foreign places (18 U.S.C. § 2423(c), on the books since 2003 for travellers and since 2013 for Americans who reside abroad), which carries no limitations period, comes into play. The complaint of November 5th is thus not an ending. It is the first document that could be signed.
The Defense, Before Anyone Has Announced It
Markle’s defense has not yet been stated, but it can be read off the complaint, because a good complaint is written against a defense that does not yet exist. The first front is knowledge. The statute requires that possession be “knowing.” A man who for more than a decade lived outside California, first in Mexico and then in the Philippines, who suffered a stroke in 2022 and lost a leg to amputation in December, 2025, may claim that he did not remember what lay in units rented in 2008 and paid for automatically. The agent answers in advance: boxes labelled “Tom Markle,” mail in his name, an international driver’s permit bearing his photograph in the second unit, and, above all, the first witness, who found similar material among Markle’s belongings in the Philippines in 2026. It is hard to forget a collection part of which one has carried across the Pacific.
The second front is identification: one witness, photographs cropped to the figure of a man, pictures decades old. The agent adds his own comparison with other photographs of Markle, and the place where the negatives were found. For probable cause, that is enough; at trial, it will be ground for an expert. The third front is the material itself: the chain of custody of decades-old negatives, the manner of digitization (the agent notes that the scanner “does not alter the content,” because he knows the question is coming), and the dispute over whether each image is a “lascivious exhibition” in the sense of Dost. That last dispute Judge Oliver has settled for the probable-cause stage, by looking at the pictures herself; the jury’s question will be the same one, asked to a higher standard. And there is a front that is narrower than it looks. The Fourth Amendment protects against searches by the state, not by a private person acting on his own. The first witness, who according to the Sun is Markle’s son, could go through his father’s boxes without any warrant, and what he found the state may use. The California units were searched under warrants, and warrants can be attacked, but on their own terms: the son’s discovery is not one of them.
The Psychology of the Box
What the complaint leaves out, the literature supplies, on one condition: that it be read as a description of a category, not a diagnosis of a man. Kenneth Lanning, for two decades a behavioral analyst at the F.B.I., placed those who commit sexual offenses against children on a continuum from “situational” to “preferential.” The first act on impulse, weigh risk, and make sloppy mistakes. The second are more intelligent, better off, compulsive, driven by fantasy and ritual; they put needs before risks and make what Lanning called needy mistakes. A 2021 review of the typologies, by Lim and colleagues, summarizes the continuum and adds an honest caveat: the typologies rest largely on men who were caught, and, by one estimate the review repeats, at least ninety-five per cent of child sexual abuse never reaches the authorities.
As early as 1984, Lanning, with Ann Burgess and Carol Hartman, published a typology of collectors, long before the Internet. Lanning’s later monograph for the F.B.I. and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists the characteristics of such collections in six words: important, constant, organized, permanent, concealed, shared. The complaint against Markle is a case from that era. There is not a single hard drive in it. There are slides, negatives, and books.
Taken as a hypothesis, and it is a hypothesis rather than a finding, that frame makes the automatic debit stop being a mystery. The payments on two storage units survived a bankruptcy filing in 2016, years in Mexico, a move to the Philippines, a stroke, an amputation, and a return to a care home in Florida; the last of them went through on October 14th and October 20th, 2026. An automatic debit does not require a decision every month, and the defense will say so. It required one decision at the start, and the absence of a contrary one in each of the eighteen years in which it could have been cancelled. In Lanning’s terms, that is not the shape of a sloppy mistake. It is the shape of a needy one.
Research by Michael Seto and colleagues in 2006, on men referred to a clinic for assessment, found that possessing such material is a stronger indicator of pedophilia than a conviction for a contact offense; later meta-analyses added that most possessors have no documented contact offenses (about one in eight in official records, more than half in studies relying on self-report). Here, though, the complaint shifts the frame of reference. If the man on the negatives is their possessor, the allegation is not of viewing but of what Tony Krone’s typology calls the physical abuser who documents his own acts, as distinct from the producer who makes material for others. Nothing in the complaint points to distribution. Everything points to an archive.
Salla Huikuri, of the Finnish Ministry of the Interior, gathered in an article published in 2023 what is known about the ways offenders explain their acts to themselves and to others: cognitive distortions (children as sexual beings, one’s own exceptionality, a hostile world) and the techniques of neutralization that sociology described as early as 1957, in the work of Sykes and Matza: denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners. Scott and Lyman, in turn, divided accounts into justifications (I did it, but it was not wrong) and excuses (it was wrong, but it was not mine). The public statements in this case so far fit neither category, because they deny the act itself: “sick lies,” “he knew nothing,” “his fingerprints aren’t even on that stuff,” as the partner of his elder daughter put it to the Daily Mail. This settles nothing, because the innocent and the guilty sound the same. The literature on neutralization begins only where denial ends, which is exactly why it is more useful to an investigator than to a judge.
There is a thread in this case that psychology knows better than the law does. The review by Lim and colleagues reminds us that most abusers of children are family members or people from the child’s immediate circle, and that most cases are never reported. In Markle’s case, the alarm was raised by a son who, by his own account, found the material after his father left Cebu. Meghan disclosed in a statement on October 23rd that a letter containing “troubling and disturbing allegations” about her father had reached the London police, that it was shared with her, and that she was assured the claims were being investigated; her statement said 2018, and Scotland Yard, confirming the letter the next day, dated it to January, 2019, added that its contents were never shared with other law-enforcement agencies, and said it would review its own handling of the matter. From the letter to the criminal complaint, nearly eight years passed. Institutions respond to what can be entered in a ledger: a letter is an allegation; a negative is evidence.
In Sum
Thomas Markle faces one count: knowing possession of child pornography on or about October 30, 2026, in two storage units outside Los Angeles, punishable by up to twenty years in prison. The criminal complaint, approved by a judge who looked at the images herself, rests on negatives, a film code, a motel logo, and a single identifying witness. It charges neither the production of the material nor the abuse of children, and it does not say why; the likeliest reason is the calendar, which for the oldest images shut the door decades ago and for later ones may never have closed, so that the question travels with the investigation. Investigations in the Philippines, Mexico, and California go on, and Markle denies the allegations and enjoys the presumption of innocence. The psychology of the collector, known to the literature since the eighties, explains more than the complaint is willing to say, but it explains a category, not a man. If the case goes to trial, a Los Angeles jury will judge the man.
Robert Nogacki is a Polish attorney at law (radca prawny), the founder and managing partner of Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec (Skarbiec Law Firm), which has operated continuously since 2006.
The law is equal for everyone, but the parties rarely are: on one side stands an organization with time, money, and lawyers, on the other a person with one business, one nest egg, and one life.
Clients rarely come to him with a legal problem. They come with a problem that also has a legal side: an audit that began with a single invoice, money entrusted to someone who has disappeared, a company that has to be passed on before it is too late. Most such matters are decided long before the first letter is written, in decisions made without asking and in deadlines nobody remembered. So he begins by asking how the client got here, not what the client should have done.
He advises entrepreneurs and families from more than a dozen countries, including those whose accounts the tax office has just seized and who do not know what to do tomorrow morning. He defends them in tax audits, customs and fiscal inspections, disputes with the tax authorities, and criminal tax proceedings. He represents victims of investment fraud and Ponzi schemes. He helps families set up family foundations and plan succession, so that a life’s work outlasts a single generation.
Not every case can be won. Every case can be run so that the client knows where they stand. Since 2006 he has represented the victims in the WGI case (Warszawska Grupa Inwestycyjna, the Warsaw Investment Group), one of the longest criminal cases in the history of the Polish financial market, because some things must not be left half finished, even when they take two decades. In the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zonda (Zondacrypto, operated by BB Trade Estonia OÜ), he represents several hundred victims in the criminal investigation conducted by Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office and in the Estonian bankruptcy proceedings.
Kancelaria Prawna Skarbiec is listed in the rankings of Poland’s largest tax advisory firms published by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna and Rzeczpospolita, and it is a four-time recipient (2015 to 2018) of the European Medal awarded by the Business Centre Club and the European Economic and Social Committee. Robert Nogacki publishes regularly, in the press and on the firm’s website, for people who have a problem rather than a law degree, because a legal opinion the client cannot understand protects only the lawyer.
He believes that the best legal advice is the kind that means the client never has to appear in court.
