Norwegian “journalist” Helle Lyng kick-started a controversy when she attempted to heckle Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a press statement. The Ministry of External Affairs also reacted strongly to her efforts to disseminate disinformation and peddle an anti-India narrative. As the crude conduct of Lyng, who tried to lecture New Delhi on “human rights violations” and “press freedom” has been under attack, the massive scandals of prominent Norwegian figures, including the royal family, have revealed the skeletons in the closet concealed behind the distasteful pretence.
Mette-Marit, the country’s crown princess, spent years in close contact with the late child sex offender and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. She was mentioned nearly 1,000 times in the declassified tranche of Epstein Files, disclosed by the US Justice Department in February. Numerous emails exchanged between the pair were featured in the documents, indicating that they communicated between 2011 and 2014 after he entered a guilty plea in 2008 to charges involving the solicitation of prostitution from an underage person in Florida.
The two sides were acknowledged to have been in contact in 2019, but recent files revealed a deeper relationship than previously anticipated. Mette-Marit told Epstein that “you tickle my brain” in one email and referred to him as “soft hearted” and “such a sweetheart” in another, implying that they were intimate.
She described him as “very charming” in 2012 and queried whether it was “inappropriate for a mother to suggest two naked women carrying a surfboard for my 15 yr old sons wallpaper.” They swapped emails a few weeks earlier regarding Epstein “wife hunt” in Paris. The French city was “good for adultery,” she responded, adding that “Scandis (are) better wife material.”
In another, she signed off with “Love, Mm” and thanked him for the flowers he delivered when she was feeling under the weather. Plans to get together were frequently mentioned in the correspondence and records showed that she also spent several days at his Palm Beach home in 2013. She claimed, “Epstein was a close friend of a good friend of mine,” when asked about her stay there.
Meanwhile, the trial of her son, Marius Borg Høiby was scheduled to start at the time. He was born out of a relationship before she tied the knot with Crown Prince Haakon. Høiby has been accused of 38 offences, including drug violations, violence and rape of four women.
The crown princess blames manipulation and poor judgement for her relationship with Epstein
Interestingly, Mette-Marit asserted innocence and alleged, “I feel so manipulated, and when you are manipulated, you don’t realise it from the start. It is incredibly important for me to take responsibility for not checking his background more carefully. And to take responsibility for being so manipulated and deceived as I was,” in an interview after several weeks of silence because of heavy scrutiny and pressure to provide an explanation. “Of course, I wish I had never met him,” she insisted.
The crown princess insisted that she “didn’t know he was a sex offender or a predator” despite the reporter outlining that the fact was also mentioned in Wikipedia to which she argued, “I can’t remember this; it was 15 years ago.” However, she had informed Epstein that she looked him up on Google after his conviction in an October 2011 email. She confessed that “it didn’t look too good” and concluded with a smiley expression.
Mette-Marit termed herself as “overly trusting” and submitted, “I still didn’t know anything about all the abuse. But I had understood enough that I thought he was a bad guy who people shouldn’t have contact with. And I had seen up close how he blackmailed others. So, I regret that I didn’t tell more people, because I should have.”
She had already apologised after the disclosure of her relationship with the deceased violator but blamed it on her “poor judgement.”
Moreover, former Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen who served in the United Nations and as the president of the International Peace Institute had to leave the think tank in 2020 over his ties with Epstein. He admitted that the two met even after the events in 2008. Terje also exhibited his xenophobic and racist mindset when he wrote, “Have you heard the saying, when you meet an Indian & a snake, k*ll the Indian first,” in an email to the disgraced multimillionaire on 25th December 2015.
Now, as Lyng attempted to deliver condescending lectures to India, the track record of eminent persons from Norway, which she proudly showcased as a representation of a free and just society that champions human rights, has exposed her false grandeur that lacks any foundation in reality.
