While the lion’s share of global tabloid coverage is usually dedicated to the British royal family, recently, a new name has been popping up on the homepage of the Daily Mail: Princess Märtha Louise of Norway. On 31 August, she will marry a shaman named Durek Verrett in the village of Geiranger – and the wedding is already causing controversy.
To be fair, when Princess Märtha got engaged, no one expected a run-of-the-mill royal wedding. The daughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja, and fourth-in-line to the Norwegian throne, has always lived an unconventional lifestyle: a self-proclaimed clairvoyant and alternative therapist, she once opened an “angel school” that taught healing techniques as well as how to contact celestial beings. After much criticism, in 2019, the royal court confirmed she would no longer use her title of princess during her business activities. In 2022, she stopped undertaking royal duties altogether. Verrett, meanwhile, has battled accusations of promoting pseudoscience and has a long history of legal troubles. (During the pandemic, Verrett also came under fire for selling a medallion that he alleged could ward off Covid-19.) Yet, even with all this considered, the lead-up to the nuptials is causing another, more unexpected stir.
Throughout the relationship, the two have had a contentious relationship with the Norwegian press. At first, it was just commentary on the couple’s, well, odd behaviour. For instance, Verrett told outlets that, although the couple was introduced by mutual friends, they’d actually met in a past life: “I have memories of us in Egypt, and she was my queen and I was a pharaoh,” he told People. Yet, soon papers began accusing the shaman of spreading misinformation: “He has been talking about removing bad spirits from children,” Ingeborg Senneset, a journalist for the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten told The Times. “In 2021 he left me a series of voicemails and tried to convince me of the existence of the Illuminati. It’s kind of important people know just how far out he actually is.” Meanwhile, the couple said that much of the hatred targeted at Shaman Durek was the result of racism. “Before I met him,” Märtha told Vanity Fair in 2020, “I never thought that there was racism in Norway.”
Normally, the press office of a royal family will share images of a wedding to multiple news outlets at no cost, due to public interest as well as respect to the free press. However, the couple has instead decided to only give one publication an exclusive on their wedding photos: Hello. Furthermore, The Times reports that they sold their photos to the outlet. And while Märtha is no longer a working royal, such an arrangement is almost unheard of for a family that is connected to a taxpayer-funded institution.
This has caused an uproar within the Norwegian press, which has long covered the nuptials of the royal family: “Here a key member of the Norwegian royal family is breaking what has been a long and good tradition,” Reidun Kjelling Nybø of the Norwegian Editors’ Association told NRK, the Norwegian state broadcasting company. “Major events have been documented via Norwegian broad media, such as NTB and NRK, on behalf of the entire press, which has passed the images on to the people and to other newsrooms that want them, including foreign ones.”
To avoid conflict, the Royal House of Norway’s head of communications, Guri Varpe, has said the rest of the Norwegian royal family will refrain from taking any exclusive wedding photos. Yet as their wedding date fast approaches, it seems the fractures between the couple and the media may only continue to widen. Whether they even care is another thing: if the Daily Mail is to be believed, they’ve asked guests to abide by a “cool and sexy” dress code for their welcome party at a local hotel and plan for a boat ride along the Geiranger Fjord.
