Old photographs of Meghan Markle posing with wealthy men have resurfaced again, and the most damaging one is not with a fellow actor. It is with Mansoor “Manni” Hussain, the Leeds property developer who lived like a billionaire playboy, collected celebrity selfies like trophies, and was later forced by Britain’s National Crime Agency to surrender nearly £10 million in assets after investigators alleged he laundered money for organized crime.
The pictures circulating this week show Markle in a black strapless dress at the 2013 Global Gift Gala in London, standing close to Hussain. Another image from the same era shows her in a dimly lit restaurant leaning into Suits co-star Rick Hoffman. Critics have bundled the photos together under the same smear: her “clientele was diverse.” The implication is ugly and deliberate. One man was her television colleague. The other was a man the NCA later described as a professional enabler for gangsters, including a convicted murderer.
The 2013 photo that will not die
The Global Gift Gala, hosted by Eva Longoria at the ME Hotel, was a charity night with £1,000 tickets and tables running to £15,000. Markle, then a Suits actress with a lifestyle blog, was there as a friend of Longoria’s. Model Oliver Cheshire co-hosted. Victoria Beckham, Nicole Scherzinger and Pixie Lott were on the red carpet. Markle even gave a short interview gushing that Londoners were “so warm” and that she wanted to “stick around.” Three years later she met Prince Harry. Five years later she married him.
Hussain treated the same event as a networking opportunity. He posted the photograph with Markle on Instagram after the royal wedding, captioning it as a “great night with the Duchess of Sussex.” He had already posed with Beyoncé, Simon Cowell, Sir Philip Green and others. His social media was a catalogue of private jets, Rolls-Royces, Barbados holidays and A-list hugs. The National Crime Agency later argued that the lifestyle was not funded by legitimate property deals.
In 2020 the NCA used a civil Unexplained Wealth Order — a “McMafia order” that does not require a criminal conviction — and Hussain settled. He handed over 45 properties in London, Cheshire and Leeds, four parcels of land and hundreds of thousands in cash, a package valued at about £9.8 million. Investigators said he had links to Bradford gangster Mohammed Nisar “Meggy” Khan, later jailed for 26 years for murder, and to convicted armed robber Dennis Slade, who stayed rent-free in Hussain’s seven-bedroom Leeds house and later in a penthouse. The NCA alleged threats, blackmail and money laundering. Hussain has no criminal convictions. The civil standard of proof is lower than a jury trial. He still lost the fortune.
Tabloid coverage at the time noted the obvious: Markle almost certainly did not know who he was. Plenty of other famous people posed with him too. That has never stopped the photos being recycled as evidence that she moved in circles of dirty money long before she targeted a prince.
The “clientele” framing is the point
The restaurant photograph with Rick Hoffman is a co-star snapshot, not a smoking gun. Hoffman played Louis Litt; they worked together for years; he attended her wedding. Treating that image as interchangeable with the Hussain picture is how the smear works: lump every wealthy or well-connected man she ever stood next to into one insinuating pile. “Diverse clientele.” “Billionaire at her fingertips.” The language is not journalism. It is character assassination dressed as discovery.
Yet the pattern of Markle’s public story has always invited this kind of attack. She sold herself as a self-made actress and humanitarian who stumbled into a fairy tale. The record is more calculating. She cultivated celebrity charity circuits, dated and married a Hollywood producer, then moved on to a British prince. After the wedding she and Harry detonated the monarchy with Oprah interviews, a Netflix series and a memoir that portrayed the institution as racist and cruel. They left the working royal family, took the titles, the security arguments and the commercial deals, and spent years lecturing the world about authenticity while living in a Montecito mansion.
Harry’s role in this is not innocent. He was a serving officer and a senior royal who chose to believe the most flattering version of her past and the most damning version of his own family. He cut off his father and brother, dragged the Queen’s final years through tabloid warfare, and then discovered that life as a California content couple is expensive and that public sympathy is finite. Critics have long argued he was the easy mark — isolated, grieving his mother, eager for a grand love story — and that Markle recognized it. The resurfaced Hussain photograph does not prove she was an escort. It does prove she was comfortable in rooms full of rich men who wanted to be seen with a pretty actress. Harry married her anyway.
Why this keeps coming back
The story is six years old and still travels because it fits a larger narrative the Sussexes have never successfully killed: that Meghan Markle’s rise was not organic virtue but aggressive social climbing, and that Harry surrendered his family, his military associations and his country’s patience to protect her image. Every time they announce a new “chapter” — a lifestyle brand, a possible acting comeback, rumours of a UK return as private citizens — the old pictures reappear. The public is asked to forget the unexplained-wealth settlement, the Oprah claims that did not hold up, the security lawsuits, and the spectacle of two people who demanded privacy while monetizing every grievance.
Markle has never publicly addressed the Hussain photograph in any detail. She does not have to. It was a charity-line photo from 2013. The damage is not legal. It is reputational, and it is self-inflicted. She and Harry spent years insisting the press invented every unflattering detail about her. Then the NCA’s own case file put a suspected money-launderer in the same frame as the future Duchess of Sussex, and the couple’s response was silence followed by more brand-building.
Harry could have insisted on a quieter life. Instead he followed her into exile, into streaming deals, and into a permanent state of grievance. The photographs do not show a criminal conspiracy. They show a woman who collected powerful acquaintances and a prince who refused to ask hard questions until it was too late. That is why the pictures still land. Not because they prove the worst allegation, but because they make the official Sussex story look like the least plausible version of events.
