Prince Harry and Meghan's Pivot to Authenticity Has ...

By Jack Royston

Chief Royal Correspondent

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Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's charity has released a report highlighting the importance of authenticity to young people—but the findings chime with numerous major criticisms of the couple throughout their post-royal lives.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex's Archewell Foundation conducted interviews with 106 young people aged 10 to 25 across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Panama to find out what they look for in leaders.

And it found that young people have grown tired of the inauthenticity of influencer culture, preferring role models who are not motivated by profit and make an impact for causes they care passionately about.

The findings are striking but make difficult reading alongside the facts of the first five years of Harry and Meghan's U.S. lives, which saw them sign multimillion-dollar deals for content creation.

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In fact, certain passages of the report could serve as a convincing explanation of the couple's decline in public opinion during the years in which audiences appeared to grow tired of their narrative about the royal rift.

A Sussex source disputed this point to Newsweek: “To cast all young people as though they would take umbrage with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for making money, is just an oversimplified assessment of who they are as people and what I think that report is trying to say.

“Young people, as it relates to the brands and the things that they associate with or feel an affinity to, are largely driven by activism. It's why young people love Ben and Jerry's. It's why young people love Patagonia.

“It's why young people love activist-driven brands and if you were to look at Harry and Meghan as an activist-driven brand, which I would argue they are, they focus on showing up, doing good, and handing over a disproportionate amount of their wealth compared to the average Joe to good causes.

“That they have to make money is a moot point. We all do, unless you're a member of the institution (royal family).”

The Archewell Foundation's Report on Authentic Leaders

The report concludes that "four consistent themes emerge in how youth define leadership in the digital age," which are that "true leadership is about authenticity and credibility," that "true leadership is not about money or followers," that "true leaders take action and show impact, and that "true leadership often starts offline."

"In an online world flooded with 'fake' personas and curated perfection, authenticity is the gold standard for true leadership," the report states.

"Young people see real leadership as requiring honesty about one’s life and struggles," the report continues, "rather than promoting unrealistic standards."

Meanwhile, the report's authors note that "the term 'influencer' is seen as innately profit-motivated. For example, in Panama, a young person remarked, 'Influencers focus more on marketing to sell you something, and the end game is to make money and to get views, because that’s how they win. But we win absolutely nothing.'"

"These digital natives are quick to spot when someone has 'sold out' their platform and audience for financial gain," the report continues. "As an American participant says, 'We see it time and time again that someone who started quite authentic and really true to their own views and values all of a sudden is open to the highest bidder.'"

Intriguingly, some respondents felt influencers could be "activists, politicians, entertainers, or community leaders," but the key was "the motive and intention behind what they’re posting. If it’s a good motive and intention, and it helps the people around them to influence positively, it’s not about the money for a digital role model.”

Prince Harry and Meghan's American Odyssey

Harry and Meghan had everything the young people described when they were in the monarchy. They had no need to turn a profit because they had public funding bolstered by money from the Duchy of Cornwall, a property portfolio that funds the heir to the British throne, who at the time was King Charles III.

Their working week involved virtually nothing other than giving back through good causes they could choose themselves, reflecting the issues they genuinely cared about. They still give money and time to good causes, of course, but in their new lives they need an income.

After stepping away from the monarchy, they faced some big decisions about the kind of life they wanted. They chose a $14 million mansion in Montecito, California, and hired a private security team, which added to their annual bills. In fairness, they had received death threats, and the atmosphere in Britain was febrile at the time.

Needless to say, all of this required substantial income, and they quickly signed multimillion-dollar deals with Netflix and Spotify before adding a mega publishing contract for Harry's book, Spare. And those media organizations all wanted content exciting enough to justify the huge paychecks.

The Sussex source said: "From Spare, £1.5 million went to good causes. They have to have jobs because they’ve left the institution."

Harry and Meghan clearly did want to tell their story. Meghan let slip some of their criticisms of the palace in court filings in 2020 in a lawsuit against The Mail on Sunday over a letter she sent her father—an indication, some may think, that she would always have wanted to get her concerns off her chest.

Either way, Meghan and Harry's first royal bombshells came in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in March 2021, for which the media were told they received no payment. That signposting was clearly intended to defuse any PR backlash over inauthenticity and profit motivation of the kind the young people said they opposed.

However, after Oprah, the couple did not continue to swerve all payment for their swipes at the royals.

Meghan and Harry's Paid for Royal Bombshells

Their first Netflix project was a docuseries, Harry & Meghan, which rehashed the same story they had told Oprah less than two years earlier, only this time with a paycheck attached.

In January 2023, Harry's memoir, Spare, came out, which he was again paid for and which again spilled the secrets of royal family members.

It was at this point that polling by Redfield & Wilton for Newsweek charted a collapse in the couple's popularity among Americans, and by June 2023, their Spotify deal disintegrated. Bill Simmons, an executive for the streamer, fired a parting shot, calling Meghan and Harry "f****** grifters." In other words, he appeared to be suggesting, rightly or wrongly, that they were profit-motivated and inauthentically oversold their value to the company.

On numerous occasions, statements made by Harry and Meghan have been disputed, and one of their most high-profile statements ever comes high up that list.

Meghan told Oprah that an unnamed royal family member had voiced "concerns and conversations" about how dark her unborn child's skin had been before he was born, sparking a global guessing game about the identity of the "royal racist," as described in the media. She linked this to discussions about denying her children police protection and the titles of prince and princess. Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet did get their titles in 2022.

Most significantly, though, Harry rowed back any suggestion that Meghan called the royals racist more than 18 months later in an interview with ITV: "The British press said that. Did Meghan ever mention that they're racist?"

He added, "Going back to the difference between what my understanding is because of my own experience, the difference between racism and unconscious bias, the two things are different."

Yet that was the first sign Harry and Meghan did not support the interpretation that Meghan had accused the royals of racism, following not far off two years of headlines.

Even before that backtrack, there were already signs progressive Americans, who had always been the couple's biggest fans, were beginning to question whether Meghan's victim status was truly deserved.

The Cut's Allison P. Davis did a cover interview with Meghan and after visiting the duchess' Montecito mansion observed: "Though she has been media trained and then royal-media trained and sometimes converses like she has a tiny Bachelor producer in her brain directing what she says (at one point in our conversation, instead of answering a question, she will suggest how I might transcribe the noises she’s making: 'She’s making these guttural sounds, and I can’t quite articulate what it is she’s feeling in that moment because she has no word for it; she’s just moaning'), at this stage, post-royal, there’s no need for her to hold back.

"She’s flinging open the proverbial doors to her life; as any millennial woman whose feminism was forged in the girlboss era would understand, she has taken a hardship and turned it into content."

Meghan Markle Moves Into Lifestyle

Since then, Harry and Meghan have left behind their royal bombshells, and Meghan has sought to reinvent herself as a lifestyle entrepreneur, but has repeatedly faced allegations of inauthenticity, again, whether fair or otherwise.

TikTok influencer Michael Pavano has been posting regular clips impersonating Meghan's Netflix cooking show, With Love, Meghan, in which he paints her as out of her depth. A particular theme has been the widely ridiculed moment in the show when Meghan took Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels and repackaged them in sandwich bags to give to guests.

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Meghan also raised eyebrows when it emerged that the series is not actually filmed at her house but rather in a rental property, because she did not want the cameras to disrupt her family life.

The reviews were brutal, but among the most striking was Vulture's precisely because the journalist went to such great lengths to affirm Meghan's story about her royal exit before delivering a scathing verdict on the show itself.

Meghan had, according to TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk, been a victim of "basic, ugly racism" and "all of it was cruel and surreal—no one could ever deserve the way she was treated."

Yet VanArendonk wrote: "With Love, Meghan is an utterly deranged bizarro world voyage into the center of nothing, a fantastical monument to the captivating power of watching one woman decorate a cake with her makeup artist while communicating solely through throw-pillow adages about joy and hospitality.

"It is painfully defensive. Meghan comes across as constantly worried about what people will think, and because of it, the show can neither flaunt her unusual life, nor can it embrace legitimate ordinariness. It is at once wildly unattainable, like when she describes the joys of sourcing beeswax from your local beekeeper, and mind-bogglingly basic, as in building a whole segment out of arranging fruit in rainbow order."

Analysis

If young people prize authenticity and credibility, then those are two areas in which Harry and Meghan have lost some of the goodwill they built up during their time as working royals. And if what they do not like seeing is profit-motivated action, then Harry and Meghan have been pushed into doing exactly that by their decision to quit royal life. Of course, they are hardly the only people in public life who need to make a living but that pressure has clearly guided some of their decision making.

Yet, if what young people want to see from leaders is impact, Harry and Meghan have significantly reduced their ability to deliver that outside the monarchy. They do, after all, far less charity work now that they have bills to pay compared to their time as working royals. It paints a bleak picture—and it's their own foundation's research.

Do you have a question about King Charles III and Queen Camilla, Prince William and Princess Kate, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, or their family that you would like our experienced royal correspondents to answer? Email [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

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