Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway has apologised after it emerged she had exchanged dozens of effusive emails with Jeffrey Epstein despite knowing that he had been imprisoned for procuring an underage girl for prostitution.
The disclosures are acutely uncomfortable for the Norwegian monarchy as it braces itself for the trial of Mette-Marit’s son, Marius Borg Hoiby, who will appear in court on Tuesday to answer charges of raping four women and committing 34 other offences.
Mette-Marit, 52, was previously known to have met Epstein on at least three occasions in Oslo, New York and the Caribbean between 2011 and 2013, after he was given an 18-month prison sentence in 2008 for paying a 14-year-old girl $300 to remove her clothes and give him a massage.
With Crown Prince Haakon of Norway
JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
After Epstein’s death in 2019, the crown princess apologised to his victims, insisting that she “would never have had contact with Epstein if I had known about his criminal activities”.
Yet the latest release of about three million pages of evidence on Epstein shows that she was aware of his conviction but continued to meet and correspond with him in warm terms for three years.
“Googled u after last email. Agree didn’t look too good,” Mette-Marit wrote to Epstein from her official email address in October 2011, adding a smile emoji.
Twelve months after that, when Epstein said he was travelling to Paris on a “wife-hunting” mission but preferred “Scandinavians”, Mette-Marit replied: “Paris good for adultery. Scandis better wife material.”
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A month later, she told Epstein he was “very charming” and asked him “Is it inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old sons [sic] wallpaper?”
The boy in question appears to be Hoiby, now 29, who is Mette-Marit’s son from a brief relationship with a cocaine dealer before she married into the royal family in 2001.
Marius Borg Hoiby and Mette-Marit in 2022
LISE ÅSERUD/NTB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
In all, Mette-Marit’s name appears more than a thousand times in the cache of Epstein files, although that figure includes a number of duplicate email chains. The files disclosed at least two other previously unknown meetings between Epstein and Mette-Marit, including a stay at one of his homes in Palm Beach, Florida.
• What is in the Epstein files? The key revelations so far
There has also been speculation that she might have met Epstein with her children during a family holiday on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy in 2013. In a series of text messages, the pair arranged to meet at an “old church” on the harbourside and Mette-Marit added: “Im [sic] walking with the kids.”
The royal household said neither Mette-Marit nor her husband Crown Prince Haakon could remember whether the children, who were aged 16, nine and seven at the time, had been present.
In response to the latest release, Mette-Marit said: “Jeffrey Epstein is responsible for his own actions. But I must take responsibility for not having checked his background more thoroughly, and not seeing quickly enough what kind of person he was.
“I sincerely apologise for that. It shows that I had poor judgment, and I deeply regret having had any contact with him at all. It’s simply embarrassing.”