Mette-Marit, who became Queen of Norway on August 28, exchanged emails with Jeffrey Epstein between 2011 and 2014, years after his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
Her name appears roughly 1,000 times in the files released by the US Department of Justice in January, according to Norwegian daily VG. The palace had previously described the contact as brief and said it had ended in 2013.
One exchange dated November 1, 2012 has circulated widely since her husband succeeded to the throne. Replying to a scientific article Epstein had sent her, Mette-Marit wrote that people would soon no longer make new humans and could instead “design them in a lab”.
In the same message she told him that he made her smile because he tickled her brain. Weeks earlier she had described a royal wedding in Luxembourg as boring.
Other released messages show her asking Epstein whether it would be inappropriate to suggest wallpaper depicting two naked women for her 15-year-old son’s room, and discussing his search for a wife in Paris.
In an email from October 2011 she told him she had looked him up online and agreed that what she found did not look good, closing the sentence with a smiling face. She continued writing to him for another three years.
The files also show she stayed four days at Epstein’s Palm Beach house in 2013 while he was absent, an arrangement the palace said was made through a mutual friend. It said she broke off contact in 2014 because she believed he was using the relationship as leverage with others.
Mette-Marit apologised twice in February and told broadcaster NRK in March that she had been manipulated and deceived, and had not known Epstein was an abuser. She is not accused of any wrongdoing.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said she had shown “poor judgement”, a rare rebuke of a royal by a serving Norwegian head of government. A survey for broadcaster TV2 that month found 47.6 per cent of Norwegians opposed her becoming queen and 28.9 per cent in favour.
The Norwegian fallout has reached European institutions. Thorbjørn Jagland, prime minister in 1996-1997 and Council of Europe secretary general from 2009 to 2019, was charged with aggravated corruption in February after the organisation’s Committee of Ministers waived his immunity at Oslo’s request. He denies all charges.
Diplomats Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul are also under investigation. The Storting voted in March to establish an independent commission into contacts between Epstein and the Norwegian foreign ministry.
