While the lion’s share of global tabloid coverage is usually dedicated to various scandals of 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 August 31, 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 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 behavior. 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 of London. “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.
