OSLO, March 20 (Reuters) – Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit said on Friday that she regrets her friendship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, seeking to contain one of the biggest scandals to hit the country’s royal family.
The release of millions of Epstein documents by the United States Department of Justice caused a stir around the world, revealing the financier’s links to prominent people, including the crown princess and leading Norwegian politicians, business executives and diplomats.
‘I was manipulated and deceived,’ Mette-Marit said in a tearful interview with public broadcaster NRK shown on Friday morning.
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“Of course I wish I had never met him,” she said of Epstein.
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The files showed frequent communication between Mette-Marit and Epstein, which occurred long after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting an underage girl. The 52-year-old crown princess, who apologized to King Harald and Queen Sonja in a Feb. 6 statement, has not been charged with any criminal wrongdoing.
While previous media coverage had shown that Mette-Marit had links to Epstein, the new documents pointed to a more extensive relationship, prompting an unusual rebuke from the prime minister and a demand for her to give a full account.
On Friday, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said it was important that Mette-Marit answered questions about her relationship with Epstein.
‘She regretted her contact with him and was genuinely remorseful. She took responsibility for not checking his background more thoroughly,’ Stoere said in a note emailed to Reuters.
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The princess, wife of Crown Prince Haakon, heir to the throne, maintained contact with Epstein from 2011 to 2014, and stayed at his Palm Beach home for four days during a private trip in 2013, according to US archives.
‘He used the fact that we had a mutual friend and that I’m naive. I like to believe in the best of people. But I also chose to end contact with him,’ said Mette-Marit.
‘I’ve never seen anything illegal,’ she told NRK.
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Epstein’s files appear to contradict a statement she gave in 2019 in which she apologized for not investigating his past and said she would never have associated with him if she had known the seriousness of the crimes he committed.
In a released email from October 2011, three years after Epstein pleaded guilty, Mette-Marit wrote to him that she had Googled him and agreed that it ‘didn’t look very good’, followed by a smiling face.
When asked by NRK about the email, Mette-Marit said she did not remember why she wrote it.
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“But if I had found information that made me realize he was an abuser and sexual offender, I wouldn’t have written a smiley face,” she stated.
Sitting next to her, Mette-Marit’s husband Haakon said he supported his wife through a difficult time and that marriage is as much about ‘the good days as the bad’.
