At the end of the summer, Norwegians thought they had hit rock bottom. First, on August 4, they were shocked to learn that Marius Borg Hoiby, son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, had been arrested on suspicion of assaulting his girlfriend. Then, on August 31, they were stunned by the controversial wedding of Princess Märtha Louise, eldest daughter of King Harald V and Queen Sonja, to the American Durek Verrett, a self-proclaimed shaman suspected of quackery. The worst, however, was yet to come. Borg Hoiby, 27, was taken into custody on November 18, before being released on Wednesday, November 27. He has been accused of two rapes, one of which was documented by a video found by police on his cell phone.

Initially cautious, specialists in Norwegian royalty now admit that the situation is serious: "This is the biggest crisis [the monarchy has experienced] since 1905 and the country's independence," said Caroline Vagle, reporter for the magazine Se og Hør. TV2 commentator Ole-Jorgen Schulsrud-Hansen explained, "It's the other side of the coin when you have a family at the head of the state. Anything that affects the family affects the institution, and vice versa."

For those, still in the minority in the country, who dream of seeing Norway become a republic, these serial scandals above all reveal "the problems inherent in the monarchical regime," remarked left-wing Socialist MP Andreas Sjalg Unneland: "It's a kind of lottery. We can only hope that the members of the royal family behave well and that we'll have good luck with those who are born or marry into it."

Borg Hoiby has a special place in the family photo. Born in 1997 to Mette-Marit, a waitress at the time, and Morten Borg, a financial analyst convicted of drug possession and use in the early 2000s, the young man has no royal blood. But his mother, who married Crown Prince Haakon in 2001, is now the future queen of Norway. Although this union caused controversy at the time, it was eventually accepted by Norwegians as a sign of the modernization of the monarchy.

Raised in opulent palaces, Borg Hoiby led a dissolute life following the end of his high school years in 2016. In 2017, he was fined for cocaine possession at a music festival. His troubles with the law seemed to end there. Until August 4, when he was arrested on suspicion of physically assaulting his girlfriend the previous day in an apartment in Oslo's upmarket Frogner neighborhood. A few days later, he made an act of contrition. In a statement sent to the public broadcaster NRK on August 14, he admitted the facts, while insisting that he had acted "under the influence of alcohol and cocaine" and claimed to suffer from "several mental illnesses."

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