Room 250 at Oslo’s District Court may only be a ten-minute walk from the understated elegance of Norway’s Royal Palace.

But with its stark grey walls, drab furnishing and straight-backed chairs, it must have felt like another world to Marius Borg Hoiby, son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit.

Not that Marius, 29, whose step-father is next in line to the Norwegian throne, was there in person on Monday.

Instead he appeared via video link as he was found guilty of two charges of rape, six of sexual molestation and six of ‘reckless behaviour’, among a total of 34 charges, and sentenced to four years in prison.

His crimes were as audacious as they were grim. One of the rapes took place at an after party in the basement of his parents’ country residence in 2018, the second at a party in Oslo in 2024.

Marius was caught after footage was found on his phone and laptop of him assaulting his victims, who were unconscious.

His conviction followed a six-week trial that has shocked and unsettled Norwegians already reeling from a series of scandals that makes our own monarchy seem harmonious and almost well-behaved in comparison.

For Marius’s mother Mette-Marit, 52 – who is the equivalent in role to our Princess of Wales and married into the royal family in 2001 when Marius was four – was recently revealed to have continued what appeared to be a close friendship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein long after he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in 2008.

Her name appears at least 1,000 times in the Epstein files – in emails sent between 2011 and 2014, including her calling Epstein ‘such a sweetheart’, apparently making plans to meet him in person and signing off with an affectionate ‘Mm’ or ‘Mette m’.

And as she battles to save her beleaguered reputation, her health is failing.

Having been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis in 2018, a progressive lung disease that causes difficulty breathing, she was fitted with an oxygen tube to her nose earlier this year and underwent a successful lung transplant just this Wednesday after two weeks on the waiting list.

Without one, it has been suggested she may not have had more than a year to live.

Then there is the former Princess Martha Louise, 54, the eldest daughter of current King Harald V, 89, a second cousin (once removed) of King Charles. 

After falling in love with Durek Verrett, a self-styled spiritual healer-slash-conspiracy theorist, depending on who you ask, Martha Louise relinquished her royal duties in a move coined ‘Norway’s Megxit’.

But the pair still stand accused of profiteering from their royal status while complaining about the unwanted attention.

A documentary called Rebel Royals: An Unlikely Love Story, charted the run up to their 2024 wedding, for which they sold their photos to Hello! magazine and the film rights to Netflix.

And this autumn the couple will star in a reality TV series, Alternative Norway, documenting their spiritual beliefs.

Verrett, 51, has described himself as a ‘hybrid species of reptilian and Andromeda’ (referring to the galaxy which is supposedly home to highly evolved spiritual beings in New Age philosophy) and claims he met Martha Louise in another life when he was a Pharaoh in Egypt.

In a 2019 book that was subsequently withdrawn by its Norwegian publishers, Verrett claimed that chemotherapy is ineffective and childhood cancer arises from a child’s unhappiness and subconscious desire not to live.

Verrett has since acknowledged that some of his views are controversial and said it was never his ‘intention’ to cause a problem for the Norwegian royal family.

That said, he recently warned the forthcoming TV show might make people ‘very uncomfortable’ – which is perhaps the most kindly way of describing how most Norwegians feel towards this family right now.

Even before Marius’s shocking rape conviction, approval ratings for the royals, once feted for their fairytale image, had fallen to record lows – from highs of 84 per cent to 60 per cent. Now some are calling for the abolition of the monarchy altogether.

Although Marius doesn’t hold a royal title and has never carried out official duties, he was effectively brought up as a royal by Crown Prince Haakon (the equivalent of Prince William) who went on to have two children with Mette-Marit: Princess Ingrid Alexandra, 22, and Prince Sverre Magnus, 20.

Marius’s biological father Morten Borg, a businessman whom Mette-Marit had a brief fling with before meeting Haakon at a music festival, has also served time in jail – for drug offences.

However, he was brought up in the royal fold and made an angelic-looking page boy at the lavish wedding in Oslo Cathedral in 2001.

Yet Marius appears racked by both his privilege and outsider status from childhood.

In court he tearfully described being ‘harassed and tormented’ from the age of three, leading a life few could relate to. 

He said: ‘I am known for being my mother’s son. Nothing else. I have had an extreme need for validation. And that manifested itself in a lot of sex, a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol.’

In adolescence, he frequented exclusive nightclubs in Oslo where cocaine was rife.

He socialised with models and influencers, seemingly behaving exactly as he liked without any consequences.

And his mother knows better than most what it feels like to be an outsider. Mette-Marit is the daughter of a journalist and a bank clerk who later divorced. 

Following the split, her father married a stripper and Mette-Marit herself said she lived a ‘wild life’ during her university years.

She was initially seen as an unsuitable royal by the more conservative Norwegians.

Yet her son’s behaviour transgressed far beyond typical youth rebellion. He was arrested in August 2024 after police were called to a flat in an upmarket area of Oslo, where neighbours had heard a man shouting ‘I want you to die’.

Police found a chandelier shattered on the floor and a knife in the wall. Marius’s alleged victim, who cannot be named but with whom he had been living for a year, had been hit, pinned to the bed and ‘repeatedly choked’.

Shortly after Marius’s arrest was reported, two former partners spoke of being abused by him.

Model, actor and influencer Juliane Snekkestad, 30, who dated Marius between 2018 and 2022, said on social media she felt ‘a real responsibility to speak out’, while reality star and influencer Nora Haukland, 29, who lived with Marius for a year afterwards, said he called her a ‘f***ing whore’, strangled, kicked her and slammed doors in her face.

Marius was then accused of sexually assaulting four women while they were unconscious, which constitutes rape under Norwegian law, between 2018 and 2024. They found out from footage Marius allegedly took on his own phone.

Throughout his trial, his mother kept a low profile, although she had previously railed at the suggestion she and her husband had reacted inappropriately to the charges. 

‘What perhaps makes me most upset is being criticised for how we have handled this as parents,’ she said. ‘That we haven’t taken it seriously. I find that difficult.’

Within hours of his conviction for rape, lawyers announced Marius would appeal.

The reaction from the royals, meanwhile, was silence, with a spokesman for the Norwegian royal court simply saying on Monday: ‘The matter has been considered by the courts, and we have no comment on the outcome.’

The Norwegian public is already reeling from revelations regarding his mother’s relationship with Epstein. 

Just as the former prince Andrew’s ties to the convicted paedophile have seriously destabilised the British Royal Family, so Mette-Marit’s friendship caused widespread revulsion in Norway.

The tranche of emails released in the US in February revealed the future Queen seeing Epstein in New York while on official duty with her husband – although there is no suggestion Haakon has done anything wrong – after Epstein served time in jail for soliciting sex from underage girls.

In one disturbing email, Mette-Marit asked Epstein if it was ‘inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old (sic) son’s wallpaper’.

Another email written by their mutual friend Boris Nikolic – a former scientific adviser to Bill Gates – in December 2018, eight months before Epstein’s suicide, suggested they were planning to meet in Florida the following year.

In a statement afterwards, Mette-Marit said: ‘I showed poor judgment and I deeply regret having had any contact with Epstein. It is simply embarrassing.’

She confessed she should have checked the disgraced financier’s background ‘more closely’ – despite having admitted to the man himself she had Googled him in 2011 and ‘it didn’t look good’.

Under pressure from Norway’s prime minster, who ‘agreed’ Mette-Marit had made an error of judgment, she succumbed to an interview with Norwegian broadcaster NRK in March this year.

Sitting beside her husband, she said she was ‘manipulated and deceived’ by Epstein but reiterated that she ‘did not know he was a sex offender or abuser’.

As if to emphasise the family’s precipitous fall from grace, the interview was filmed on the final day of Marius’s trial.

Alluding to her son but not the women affected by his crimes, she said: ‘I am the mother of a young man who has been in a very demanding situation.’

She also referred to her health and need for ‘a lot of rest’. Last December she said her pulmonary fibrosis, which causes scarring on the lungs, had progressed ‘faster than I’d hoped’.

Her husband added he had noticed she was struggling with her breathing and the hiking and skiing the couple once loved were no longer possible. A lung transplant is a last resort.

All of which might make the antics of Haakon’s sister Martha Louise seem somewhat trivial in comparison. But they have, without doubt, also undermined trust in the royals, too.

Martha Louise has long considered herself an outsider, relinquishing her Royal Highness title in 2002 to work in ‘alternative’ health. That included opening a training centre for clairvoyants known as the ‘angel school’.

In 2017 she divorced her husband of 15 years, Norwegian writer and artist Ari Behn, with whom she had three daughters.

He suffered depression and took his own life on Christmas Day 2019. By that time Martha Louise had already met her ‘twin flame’ Californian Durek Verrett on a Norwegian talk show, on which the pair claimed to have met each other in another life.

Announcing their relationship on Instagram that year, she rebuffed her critics, saying: ‘It is not up to you to choose for me or to judge me. Shaman Durek is merely a man I love spending my time with and who fulfils me.’

He is also a man with plenty of Hollywood fans, not least Gwyneth Paltrow, who has described him as ‘light on Earth’.

Before Verrett proposed to Martha Louise in June 2022, he showed his ‘dear friend’ Gwyneth the engagement ring ‘because I knew she’s very particular about nice things, so I wanted her to be the first to see it’.

Their marriage was a four-day ceremony by a fjord, at which her mother Queen Sonja and brother Haakon both gave speeches. The dress code cited on the invitations was ‘sexy and cool’.

While some of her husband’s beliefs might sound innocuous – funny, even – others, such as his views on cancer, are obvious cause for concern.

He once sold medallions which he claimed could prevent Covid and has also said women should do ‘exercises’ to ‘clean’ imprints in their vaginas that occur when they have too many sexual partners.

While Verrett claims he is being deliberately misinterpreted by a racist press, the couple’s new TV series, to be screened on the Nordic streaming service Viaplay is unlikely to do much to dispel the criticism.

And what of King Harald, the reigning monarch, and Queen Sonja? They have remained largely silent throughout their troubles, no doubt exacerbated by the increasingly frail king’s own health problems – he has been using a pacemaker since 2024 and was hospitalised for an infection this February.

Perhaps tellingly, to mark his 89th birthday this February he released a picture of himself flanked by two generations of his immediate successors – his son the Crown Prince and granddaughter Princess Ingrid Alexandra.

Posed in a way to suggest his successors literally have his back, the portrait was a rare departure from the formal solo birthday pictures usually issued.

It was, royal experts have said, the clearest hint yet that Norway’s King intends to streamline the monarchy, with the two senior – and scandal-free – royals offering staunch support.

Heaven knows he needs it.