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18-06-2026
OSLO: Marius Borg Hoiby, the 29-year-old son of Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit, has been found guilty of two counts of rape and sentenced to 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.
Hoiby was not in court for the verdict for unspecified health reasons but joined the session via video link. Prosecutors had called for Hoiby to be given seven years and seven months in prison. His defence lawyers had called for a lesser term of 18 months and have said he will appeal even though Marius Borg Hoiby is not himself a royal figure, the trial has cast a shadow over the broader royal family. His mother married Crown Prince Haakon when he was four and he grew up within the family. The palace has said it will not comment on Monday’s verdict.
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, Hoiby’s defence lawyer Petar Sekulic again asked the court for his release, however the court rejected the plea late on Monday, ruling that there was a risk that he might contact a woman he was convicted of assaulting, and who he had broken a restraining order to see in the past.
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.
Hoiby 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 and of causing serious bodily harm to another partner, in whose flat he was arrested in the upmarket Frogner area of Oslo in August 2024.
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. Sekulic said it was “in the nature of the case that there could be an appeal”. His defence colleague Ellen Holager Andenæs told reporters they were satisfied with the acquittals but were more critical of other aspects of the verdict.
Both lawyers then went to discuss the verdict with Hoiby at ILA prison and detention centre outside Oslo.
The case against Hoiby involved six women but only one of the women was in court to hear the verdict and she was seen crying as Hoiby was found guilty of raping her.
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.
The case rested on videos that Hoiby 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. The women had been unaware of the incidents until police found videos on Hoiby’s phone after his arrest.
The judges also found it proven that the woman in the 2018 rape case had been asleep at the time and unable to resist Hoiby. She only found out that Hoiby had filmed what had happened last year. (Int’l News Desk)
