A Oslo court delivered its verdict on 15 June 2026 in the criminal case against Marius Borg Høiby, stepson of Norway's Crown Prince Haakon and son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, who stood trial on 40 separate criminal charges — among them four counts of rape and multiple counts of domestic violence, according to NRK.

The charge sheet, one of the most extensive filed against a figure of peripheral royal proximity in Norway's recent legal history, alleged rape against four different women. One of the alleged offences was said to have taken place after Høiby had already been taken into police custody — a detail that added procedural complexity to the prosecution's timeline, as NRK reported in August 2025.

Høiby entered a not guilty plea to all four rape counts when the trial opened in February 2026, Reuters reported. His defence team went further in closing arguments the following month, contending that the prosecution had produced no evidence sufficient to sustain any of the rape charges, and separately demanding full acquittal on the domestic violence counts as well, NRK reported.

Prosecutors had asked the court to impose a sentence of seven years and seven months — a term that, if handed down, would place the case among the heavier sentences sought in Norwegian courts for equivalent offences. Norwegian criminal procedure does not separate conviction from sentencing; the court's judgment on 15 June addressed both simultaneously.

The case drew sustained public attention in Norway less because of the defendant's family connections than because of its procedural breadth: 40 charges, spanning multiple complainants, multiple incident types, and a timeline that extended beyond the point of initial arrest. That scope made acquittal on every count statistically unlikely but shaped the defence's strategy toward attacking evidentiary foundations count by count rather than offering an alternative narrative.

Norway's royal family maintained a public profile throughout the proceedings. The involvement of a family member — however distant from the line of succession — placed the institution in an uncomfortable position that Norwegian palace protocol offered little guidance for navigating.

The verdict, delivered on 15 June, now sets the evidentiary record. Whatever the outcome, the case will likely inform how Norwegian prosecutors and courts handle similarly structured multi-complainant sexual offence cases going forward — particularly the procedural question of charges arising from alleged conduct after an initial arrest.