Back in 2020, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry stepped down from their roles as senior royals in order to start new lives in the US.
That same year, the couple founded Archewell Inc., an organization that combined the Sussexes’ business and humanitarian ventures and would serve as a launch pad for their future endeavors.
Like most new businesses, Archewell has experienced some ups and downs, including the recent cancelation of Meghan’s Spotify podcast, which was the first major production from Archewell Audio.
But media is a notoriously unpredictable sector, and such setbacks are to be expected.
What’s more surprising is the fact that donations to the Sussexes’ charity plummeted last year.
According to recently revealed tax documents, the Archewell Foundation received just $2 million in contributions in 2022.
That’s down from more than $13 million in donations the previous year.
News of the downturn caps off what might be, from a PR standpoint, the most difficult year of the Sussexes’ marriage.
In fact, the recent wave of bad press has prompted one prominent UK politician to demand that Harry and Meghan be stripped of their titles.
That won’t happen, of course, but it serves as a reminder of the couple’s declining popularity in Harry’s home country.
And the dip in annual revenue isn’t the only potentially embarrassing detail contained within Archewell’s latest tax filing.
The organization’s annual IRS 990 document outlines the average weekly working hours for its five employees — including Harry and Meghan, who are listed as working just one hour a week.
While critics of the couple have cited this fact as further evidence of their alleged laziness, the Sussexes are actually following standard operating procedure for directors of non-profits.
“You’ll typically see that listed for many directors,” attorney Seth Perlman explained to Newsweek in a recent interview.
“If you have four board meetings a year—that’s what directors do, they hold board meetings—then that turns into basically 12 hours a quarter,” the attorney continued.
“Which is, you know, a sufficient amount of time and a typical amount of time for board members to act.”
And obviously, the operation of the charitable wing of the foundation is not the only thing that Harry and Meghan have going on career-wise.
In fact, this past year was the couple’s busiest to date.
In addition to their duties at Archewell, the Sussexes produced two Netflix documentary series and helped to organize the annual Invictus Games, which Harry co-founded in 2014.
And of course, Harry published his debut memoir and continued to carry out occasional royal duties.
In other words, the Sussexes were likely busier than most of their critics, but don’t expect that inconvenient fact to put an end to the allegations of laziness.