Never ones for talking down their achievements, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have launched a slick new website claiming they are “shaping the future through business and philanthropy.”
The website, which went live late Monday, is fueling longstanding rumors the couple are looking to reinvigorate their struggling brand after being dropped by Spotify last year, following a lackluster podcast by Meghan, largely devoted to interviews with her celebrity female friends.
You wouldn’t know from their website that the podcast was widely mocked, however, with Meghan’s page praising Archetypes as “a record-breaking podcast” that “topped the charts as the Number 1 podcast in 47 countries.”
While it is true that the early episodes headed global podcast charts, listeners soon grew tired of it, with the tenth episode charting at 22 on Spotify’s U.S. rankings, as pundits called out its repetitiveness.
Meghan also boasts that the show won awards “after its first season” while neglecting to say it wasn’t actually commissioned for a second season, with just 12 episodes emerging from their rumored $20 million contract with Spotify.
Meghan’s recollections of her children’s book The Bench also seem to vary from other people’s. In her bio she describes it as “acclaimed,” while in reality it was ridiculed by outlets such as the New York Times, which wrote about “the tortured rhyme and reason of Meghan Markle” and joked, “What she does in the last line of the book—contracting ‘alone’ into ‘’lone’ in order to get it to rhyme with ‘home’—should be illegal.”
Meghan’s page adds that her and Harry’s “mission” catchphrase is “Show Up, Do Good.”
The page adds, in what some might suspect to be classic Meghan word salad, “They hold the value that charitable work should not simply be ‘a handout, but rather a hand held.’”
The new website, Sussex.com, describes Harry as “a humanitarian, military veteran, mental health advocate, and environmental campaigner” and says he has “dedicated his adult life to advancing causes that he is passionate about and that advance permanent change for people and places.”
Meghan, meanwhile, says she is “a feminist and champion of human rights and gender equity.”
The page was criticized by some as a transparent attempt by the couple to cash in on their royal titles and status, but a source described as “close to the couple” by the Daily Mail said, “Prince Harry and Meghan are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. That is a fact. It is their surname and family name.”