Marius Borg Høiby, the 29-year-old son of Norway's Crown Princess Mette Marit, has been found guilty of two counts of rape and given four years in jail.
1 hour ago
Paul KirbyEurope digital editor
LISE ASERUD/NTB/AFP
Marius Borg Høiby, the 29-year-old son of Norway's Crown Princess Mette-Marit, has been found guilty of two counts of rape and given four years in prison.
The three judges in courtroom 250 at Oslo District Court cleared him of two other counts of rape, but found him guilty of many of the other offences of which he had been accused.
Høiby was not in court for the verdict, but joined the session via video link.
Prosecutors had called for Høiby to be given seven years and seven months in prison. His defence lawyers had called for a lesser term of 18 months and can appeal against the verdict.
Marius Borg Høiby's mother married into the royal family when he was four, and although he grew up within the family he is not himself a royal figure.
Mette-Marit is very ill with a form of pulmonary fibrosis and has recently been placed on a lung transplant list. Her son's lawyers have repeatedly sought his release from prison so he could spend time with his mother because of her declining health.
After the verdict, Høiby's defence lawyer Petar Sekulic again asked the court for his release.
One of the three judges in the trial, Judge Jon Sverdrup Efjestad, began the session early on Monday with a summary of their conclusions, before going into a 128-page ruling explaining the verdict.
Høiby had denied all four counts of rape, but the judges convicted him of raping two women, including one on the Crown Prince's estate at Skaugum in 2018 and another involving a woman in Oslo in 2024.
He was also convicted of abusing an ex-girlfriend, Norwegian influencer Nora Haukland.
However, he was cleared of two further rapes, involving a woman he met at a hotel in Oslo in November 2024 and another he met while on holiday in the Lofoten islands in 2023.
The case against Høiby involved six women, but only one of the women was in court to hear the verdict.
Prosecutors said she had been either incapacitated or asleep when she was raped after a party in Oslo in March 2024, and after they had engaged in consensual sex.
Evidence that she was raped rested on videos that Høiby had filmed at the time and, giving evidence in February, the woman told the court that she was asleep and would never have allowed it to happen.
The court agreed the victim had been unable to resist what had happened.
All four rape charges involved women who had been either asleep or incapacitated at the time.
Høiby was also convicted of several offences including abuse and reckless behaviour towards a sixth woman from the upmarket Frogner area of Oslo, whose flat he was arrested at in August 2024.
The court ruled he should pay a total of 640,000 kroner (£50,000; €57,000) in compensation to four of the women, including Nora Haukland, the only woman judges ruled could be named in the case.
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