Norway's crown princess breaks silence on Epstein links: 'I was manipulated and deceived'

Norway's Crown Princess Mette-Marit has told national TV that she wishes she had never met late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, breaking seven weeks of silence after the extent of her contacts with him emerged. "I feel so manipulated, and when you are manipulated, you don't realise it from the start," Mette-Marit said in a 20-minute interview in which she was often on the verge of tears. Seven weeks ago, Norwegians discovered that the crown princess had exchanged hundreds of emails with the disgraced Epstein between 2011 and 2014, and stayed in his Florida house when he was not there. "It is incredibly important for me to take responsibility for not checking his background more carefully," she said. "And to take responsibility for being so manipulated and deceived as I was." She has already apologised and admitted to "poor judgement", after the close nature of her links to Epstein came to light when millions of Epstein files were released by the US justice department at the end of January. "Of course I wish I had never met him," the princess told public broadcaster NRK, stressing that it was Epstein's victims who deserved justice for the great abuse they had suffered. She said she felt great anger they had not yet received it. Her decision to speak publicly comes after intense scrutiny and pressure to explain herself, including from Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. The crown princess gave little away during the conversation, and some of her responses came across as defensive. In 2011, three years after Epstein had been jailed for soliciting underage sex, she wrote: "Googled u after last email. Agree didn't look too good." Sitting alongside her husband, Crown Prince Haakon during the interview, Mette-Marit maintained she "didn't know he was a sex offender or a predator", even though the reporter pointed out that a Wikipedia article on Epstein at the time had made clear he was a convicted abuser. "I can't remember this; it was 15 years ago." "I still didn't know anything about all the abuse. But I had understood enough that I thought he was a bad guy who people shouldn't have contact with," she told NRK. "And I had seen up close how he blackmailed others. So I regret that I didn't tell more people, because I should have." She admitted to being too trusting of Epstein, but when asked why neither the palace nor the foreign ministry knew about her links to him, she said he was a "private contact" and she did not tell everyone about her private contacts. Asked why she spent several days in Epstein's home in Palm Beach in 2013, she explained that it was down to an unnamed mutual acquaintance. "Epstein was a close friend of a good friend of mine," she said. She spoke of a "situation" that made her feel uneasy on the last day of her stay at the house, but refused to go any further, other than to say she phoned her husband about it. Crown Prince Haakon tells the interviewer that he remembers Mette-Marit's call well and how it made his wife feel "unsafe". Despite the incident, the crown princess maintained contact with Epstein for some time afterwards. "I am overly trusting, I tend to think the best of people," she said. "But I also chose to end all direct contact with him. And it was because of such episodes as that." For Tove Taalesen, royal correspondent for the Nettavisen website, the interview raises more questions that it answers. "Something must have happened and she didn't want to tell us that." "She blew the possibility to come clean and to be honest," Taalesen told the BBC. The interview was recorded on Thursday, the final day of her son Marius Borg Høiby's rape trial, which began at the start of February, days after the Epstein files involving Mette-Marit were released. A verdict is not due until June, but it is clear she waited for the trial to end before speaking publicly. The crown princess was already known to have had links to Epstein in 2019, when she said she regretted having contact with him, but the extent of their relationship only became clear in the Epstein files. In the NRK interview, her justification for not giving details of the friendship is that while she and her husband live their lives in the public eye, it is still important to have a private life. For historian and TV2 royal correspondent Ole-Jørgen Schulsrud-Hansen she is wrong to put her privacy before the institution of the royal family, and that reveals a "perception of their role that is not compatible with the institution". "The only thing this exposes is that the Norwegian royal family and the royal court have misunderstood what it means to be royal - and if they don't turn that boat around this will happen again." Mette-Marit was also asked whether she had the motivation to remain in her royal role. She has been in poor health and the recent Epstein revelations have raised doubts among many Norwegians that she still has the capacity to become queen, when Crown Prince Haakon accedes to the throne. The crown princess, 52, who suffers from the lung disease pulmonary fibrosis, made clear that everything depended on her state of health. The interview was limited to 20 minutes because of her health, and commentators say it was not always easy to hear what she said because of her breathing. "I live with a serious illness," she said. "That is the very thing that decides whether in fact I can continue to perform in the role I hold, or not." "I would very much like to stand by him in that project, if I have the opportunity to do so, given my health." Her husband told the interviewer that after more than 25 years of marriage, they continued to stand together. "This is after all our project, which we're doing together." The use of the term "project" comes across as surprising, says royal correspondent Tove Taalesen: "A project is something you do at work, but if you are the king and queen, you have a purpose in life."