By Nora Buli and Gwladys Fouche
OSLO, Aug 28 (Reuters) – Mette-Marit was 25, an unmarried single mother and a commoner when she met Norway’s then Crown Prince Haakon at the Quart music festival in her home city of Kristiansand in 1999.
“I just looked at her. She was like a light,” Haakon — who became king on Friday — wrote in his autobiography.
They managed to date in secret for a few months before the news leaked.
“What has happened between Haakon and I has happened between two normal people,” Mette-Marit told journalists, pushing back at early attempts to portray her as a real-life Cinderella.
The media also explored more negative angles, pressing her for details of her lifestyle when she was part of Norway’s house music scene and questioning the propriety of someone with such a background entering the royal family.
Haakon and his father King Harald, who had also married a commoner, stood by her. But it was just the first in a series of deeply bruising clashes between her private and public life.
“The discomfort from that year is still with me. To feel hunted is an overwhelming feeling,” she was quoted as saying in Haakon’s book.
“I can promise you, there is nothing romantic about being washed clean of your sins in full public view. It is terrible.”
‘LIVING QUITE A WILD LIFE’
Norway’s new queen was born Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby in Kristiansand on August 19, 1973, the daughter of a journalist father and a mother who worked as a bank clerk. The couple divorced when she was a child and she lived with her mother and her siblings.
Of her partying years, Mette-Marit told journalists in 2001: “At that time, it was important for me to live against what was accepted. That also led to me living quite a wild life.”
“I was in an environment where things were tested and we crossed boundaries,” she added.
She married her prince that year and initially struggled to adapt to her position. But “with time she found herself more at home in the role, and became more herself,” Trond Noren Isaksen, a historian and author of several books on the Norwegian monarchy, told Reuters.
Her strengths lay in “her great personal warmth” and her ability to connect with people, he added.
She became just Mette-Marit — the royal family does not use surnames.
Between 2000 and 2002, she studied ethics at the University of Oslo and in 2003 took courses at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, focusing on international development, HIV/AIDS and refugee issues.
She went on to focus on literature — promoting Norwegian authors such as Karl Ove Knausgaard abroad and encouraging children to read.
She settled into the life of a royal spouse: acting as patron to several charities, attending events, raising her children — her first-born, Magnus Borg Hoiby, and the children she had with Haakon, Ingrid Alexandra, next in line for the throne, and Sverre Magnus.
Abroad she campaigned on global health issues, focusing on women’s empowerment and reproductive health, and acted as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N.’s programme on HIV/AIDS.
That work brought her into further contact with high society donors and fund-raisers and other international jet-setters, including an introduction to convicted U.S. sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
‘I WAS MANIPULATED’
Two decades after her wedding, she was back under an intense media glare when private emails between her and Epstein were released by the U.S. Justice Department in January 2026.
The correspondence continued after his conviction. In one released email from October 2011, Mette-Marit wrote to him that she had googled him and that she agreed “it didn’t look too good”, followed by a smiley face.
She later apologised to the royal family, which took its own hit from the scandal. Around 60% of Norwegians said they supported the monarchy in a poll in February 2026, down from 70% in January.
A total of 47.6% said she should not become queen in another poll for broadcaster TV2, while 28.9% said she should, the first time data on that question had been collected.
Seven weeks after the news broke, she told public broadcaster NRK she wished she had never met Epstein. “I was manipulated and deceived,” she said in a tearful interview.
POOR HEALTH AND SON ON TRIAL
The Epstein scandal came as her first son Marius, 29, was standing trial for rape and domestic violence. He denied those charges but admitted to some lesser offences.
In June he was found guilty of two out of four counts of rape and one count of domestic violence and sentenced to four years in prison. Both he and the prosecution have appealed the sentence.
She made no public statements about the trial, leaving her husband to speak to the media.
On top of everything else, Mette-Marit was dealing with challenging health problems that forced her to reduce her workload.
She suffers from chronic pulmonary fibrosis, a condition that makes it harder for her to breathe and leaves her exhausted.
Two days after Marius was convicted, the palace said Mette-Marit had undergone a successful lung transplant, without specifying when the procedure took place.
After several weeks of recovery in hospital, she returned home and celebrated her silver wedding anniversary with Haakon in August.
(Reporting by Nora Buli and Gwladys Fouche, editing by Andrew Heavens)
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