Norway’s crown princess, Mette-Marit, has said she was “manipulated and deceived” by Jeffrey Epstein as she spoke publicly for the first time about her years-long relationship with the late sex offender.
She also claimed that she “did not know he was a sex offender or an abuser” – despite telling him in an email in 2011, three years after he had been sentenced to 18 months in prison and pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from girls as young as 14, that she had recently Googled him.
The Epstein files, released in January by the US justice department, have rocked Norway after multiple figures from the highest echelons of society – including Mette-Marit and a former prime minister – were named in them.
On Tuesday, the Norwegian parliament voted unanimously to appoint an independent investigative commission to look into connections between the country’s foreign office and Epstein.
Mette-Marit appears to be mentioned nearly 1,000 times in the files in personal email exchanges between 2011 and 2014. In one exchange, Mette-Marit asked whether it was “inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15-year-old son’s wallpaper?”
The royal palace has previously released a statement in which Mette-Marit said she had shown “poor judgment” and expressed “deep regret at having had any contact with Epstein” but otherwise she has remained largely silent.
After seven weeks of mounting pressure – including from the prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre – she sat down for a 20-minute interview with the Norwegian broadcaster NRK, broadcast on Friday, alongside her husband, the crown prince Haakon, at their home near Oslo, the royal residence Skaugum.
The interview was filmed on Thursday, the final day of the trial of Mette-Marit’s son Marius Borg Høiby – who could face more than seven years in prison if he is found guilty of 39 offences, including four rapes, which he denies. The crown princess has pulmonary fibrosis, for which she is likely to need a lung transplant.
“I am the mother of a young man who has been in a very demanding situation,” she told NRK. “In addition, I have health that requires a lot of rest. And it has developed even more.”
“It is incredibly important for me to take responsibility for not checking [Epstein’s] background more carefully. And to take responsibility for being so manipulated and deceived as I was,” she said.
She said she feels “great anger” that Epstein’s victims have not received justice, adding: “At the same time, it’s important for me to say if I’ve done something that has contributed to giving him legitimacy in some way.”
She said Epstein was “a close friend of a good friend of mine” and that she was introduced to him through several mutual acquaintances in 2011 when she was a special envoy for the UN Aids Programme.
They had a “friendly relationship” she said, adding that he was “a friend of a friend of mine, first and foremost”. She denied any suggestion of intimacy between them.
Among the most pored over emails was one from October 2011 in which Mette-Marit wrote: “Googled you after the previous email. Agreed, it didn’t look good :).”
Asked what she had meant by this, she said she did not know.
“I spent a lot of time trying to figure that out myself. I wish I had the rest of that email correspondence,” she said, adding: “But if I had found information that made me realise that he was an abuser and sex offender, I wouldn’t have written a smiley face.”
Asked whether she might have found a Wikipedia article from the time stating that he was a convicted rapist, she said: “It’s hard for me to say, because I can’t remember. But I didn’t know he was a sex offender or an abuser, if that’s what you’re asking.”
The files also revealed that Mette-Marit had stayed in Epstein’s Palm Beach home in Florida for several days in January 2013. In her explanation, she said she went there because “a mutual friend of ours had borrowed the house” but that it is “one of the things I have spent the most time processing after the serious abuses became known in 2019.”
Visibly emotional, she said: “The fact that I have been there and, not least, have a sense of guilt for the victims. I have spent a lot of time processing this. So it is very difficult for me personally.”