Philippine Justice Department Still on Day One
LONDON – The Markle family has reportedly reached a verdict in the Philippine child abuse material investigation several days before the Philippine Department of Justice finished opening the file.
According to reporting by The Sun, relayed by CBS News, Thomas Markle Jr. told authorities he found child abuse materials in storage boxes at his father’s home in Cebu province. The Department of Justice has confirmed it is investigating, and an official said an anti-trafficking task force is handling the matter.
Thomas Markle Sr. denies it. As quoted by the Daily Mail, he said, “I have never downloaded anything like that in my life.”
No charge has been described. No finding has been announced. No court has ruled on anything.
The family, however, has been busy.
Markle Family Statements Outnumber Official Findings Three to Zero
By the end of the first news cycle, the story had produced one report from a son, one denial from a father and one statement from a daughter. The investigators had produced the word “investigating.”
Meghan Markle’s statement said she was deeply distressed. It said a letter making troubling and disturbing allegations about her father was sent to the Metropolitan Police and Royalty and Specialist Protection in 2018, and that she was later given assurances it was being investigated. She said she distanced herself from him and barred contact with her children to protect them. She hoped justice would be fully served.
Taken on its own, the statement is a woman explaining her decisions about her children. Nobody is obliged to disagree with that.
Taken as part of the news cycle, it arrived inside a process that had barely begun. The justice system had a task force. The family had a communications strategy. One of them was always going to finish first.
“Investigations are slow because evidence is slow,” said a former prosecutor in an entirely satirical consultation. “Statements are fast because they cost nothing and nobody has to authenticate them. In a celebrity case you get the fast thing first and the slow thing eventually. The public has been trained to treat that order as normal.”
Thomas Markle Sr. and the Presumption of Innocence
The allegations are serious. If the material described is real, it depicts real children, and their protection is the entire reason the process exists. Nothing in this article is meant to suggest otherwise.
But the process also has a second job, which is to make sure a person is not treated as guilty on the strength of an accusation alone. Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law. Cornell’s Legal Information Institute describes the presumption of innocence as the rule that a prosecutor must prove every element of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Neither document says the rule lapses when the accused is unpopular, elderly, estranged or related to a duchess.
Thomas Markle Sr. is 82. He has denied the allegation. He is, as of this writing, the only person in the story who hasn’t issued a statement beyond saying so, which in the current media environment makes him either very disciplined or very tired.
The Philippine Investigation Enters the Boring Phase of Justice
Journalists have now encountered the stage of any criminal case that doesn’t fit in a headline: the part where people examine things.
Devices have to be identified. Ownership has to be established. Chain of custody has to be documented. Somebody has to determine what the material is, where it came from and who put it there. None of this involves a press conference, and all of it has to happen before the words “guilty” or “innocent” mean anything legally.
“It’s not a good look for television,” said a retired detective we invented for this paragraph. “You can’t film an evidence log. People say, ‘Where’s the twist?’ The twist is a lab report in six weeks.”
The coverage cited here identifies no child, no complainant beyond the son who reported the discovery and no charge. That’s not a finding that no victim exists. It’s a finding that the reporting hasn’t reached that part yet, which is a different thing and a more patient one.
A Modest Proposal: Wait for the Investigators
The Markle family could try something new. It would be unusual, and it would probably cost them several news cycles.
Each member could say the following, in order: the allegation is serious, the investigation should run its course, the children, if any, deserve protection, and the man deserves a fair process. That’s four sentences. A fifth is optional: “We’ll know more when the investigators know more.”
Public relations professionals describe this approach as “unmarketable.” Lawyers describe it as “Tuesday.”
The alternative is the arrangement currently in use, in which a decades-old family quarrel gets reread as evidence, a son’s report is treated as a verdict, a daughter’s statement is treated as a second verdict and the actual investigators are treated as a formality that will eventually confirm what everyone already feels.
Feelings are a wonderful thing. They’ve never successfully prosecuted anybody.
5 Humorous Observations
- Everybody in this family has a statement. Nobody has a verdict. That’s the one thing you can’t get on Instagram. They tried, it’s on backorder.
- The investigators have an anti-trafficking task force. The family has a communications task force. One of those is going to finish first, and it’s not the one with the paperwork.
- You know it’s a big family drama when the guy who might be innocent is the quietest person in the story. Eighty-two years old and he’s the only one not workshopping a caption.
- “Justice will be fully served.” Great. Served how? Because right now it’s being served like airline food. Slowly, and everybody’s already complaining.
- In a normal family, you wait for the facts and then you pass the potatoes. In this family, the potatoes have a press release.
Disclaimer
This article is satire directed at celebrity public relations, public judgment and the habit of treating accusations as convictions. Thomas Markle Sr. denies the allegations against him, and no charge, ruling or finding of guilt has been reported. The allegations concerning child exploitation are serious, and the safety of any child involved must remain paramount. Quoted experts in this piece are fictional. The publication’s customary comic credit attributes this story to an entirely human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. No member of any family has issued a statement about this disclaimer, which makes it the quietest document in the entire story; readers who like their conclusions to arrive after the evidence will feel at home in our satirical news.
SOURCE: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thomas-markle-father-duchess-meghan-child-sexual-abuse-material/
