With four months to go until her royal wedding in August, Princess Martha Louise should be enveloped in one of the happiest seasons of her life. Instead, she’s firing back at reports circulated by a Nordic magazine, Se og Hør, that she calls “lies,” ahead of her August 31 wedding to Shaman Durek Verrett, who she has dated since May 2019 and has been engaged to since June 2022.
“It is so sad that it needs to be this way as a wedding should be a joyous occasion for everyone involved,” she wrote on Instagram, adding, poignantly, “Also for us…”
Martha Louise specifically called out her future mother-in-law for spreading falsehoods about his childhood. “Se og Hør continues spreading lies about my fiancé @shamandurek,” the princess wrote on Instagram. “Like I said on the podcast @heartsmart_convos, Se og Hør just repeats the lies until everybody believes them.”
Martha Louise’s words were captioned next to a photo of her and Durek standing arm-in-arm on an outdoor terrace; other photos included what Martha Louise identified as Durek’s childhood home. “This time, they are repeating the lie that Durek was not from a wealthy family as a child (because his mom says so, who got money from spreading whatever lies she could), when the truth is that he grew up in a good neighborhood, his mom left him at an early age and it was in reality his mom not having money, not him,” Martha Louise continued. “She wasn’t even around. Durek’s father’s bankruptcy came after Durek moved out, so he was not affected by his father’s bankruptcy.”
Per People, Martha Louise cited the photos she shared as “the house Durek grew up [in] Foster City, California,” which she said is worth about $2.7 million today. She also included a statement from one of Durek’s childhood friends “about how he was one of the richest kids in school.”
“It is not important to me [whether] he was from a family with money or not as a child, but the fact is that he was, and I am sick and tired of Se og Hør’s lies about us. And about Durek,” she wrote, calling out both Durek’s mother and “unethical" journalism.
She concluded “Please don’t believe what Se og Hør says about Durek or me leading up to the wedding. From experience, I know it will get worse as we move closer to the wedding.”
Martha Louise may have been referencing an interview that Durek’s mother, Veruschka Urquhart, gave to the outlet in May 2023, in which she claimed that her future daughter-in-law “brainwashed” her son, according to an English translation.
Martha Louise is the only daughter of King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway, and stepped back from being a working royal in November 2022, five months after her engagement. Martha Louise no longer carries her Her Royal Highness title and hasn’t for over 20 years—she gave it up to marry her first husband, Ari Behn, because he was a “commoner”; the two share three daughters, and Behn died by suicide on Christmas Day 2019, two years after their divorce was finalized. Though she doesn’t carry her HRH title, Martha Louise is still a princess, a title she’s maintained at the request of her father, the King. She remains fourth in line to the Norwegian throne. Durek is a Los Angeles-based shaman who has influenced the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Nina Dobrev, and Martha Louise has called her future husband her “twin flame” in the past.
