Marius Borg Høiby stays in pretrial detention after Norwegian appeal court overturns release

Appeal court keeps Høiby in custody

The Court of Appeal ruled on Wednesday, 4 November 2026, that Marius Borg Høiby, 29, the eldest son of Norway's Queen Mette-Marit, will remain in pretrial detention. The decision overturns a ruling by the Oslo District Court on Monday, 2 November, which found that the conditions for further detention were no longer met and that he could be released. The prosecution had appealed the same day and asked for custody to be extended by four weeks. The appeal court has sided with the prosecution, so his hopes of leaving custody have been dashed for now.

The appeal court found that the risk of reoffending is too high to lift custody. According to the ruling, a duty to report to authorities and regular tests for drug and alcohol use would not be enough to stop Høiby from drinking again. The court said that a relapse into alcoholism would raise the risk of reoffending both towards the so-called Frogner woman, one of the victims in the case, and towards others.

Defence reaction and the Monday hearing

On Monday, 2 November, the defence welcomed the Oslo ruling as an important success and accused the prosecution of misjudging the conditions for further custody. Defence lawyers Daniel Storrvik and Alexander Greaker told NRK that they were satisfied at that point. After Wednesday's decision, the defence said it had hoped for a different outcome, and that it would study the court's reasoning and discuss the next steps with Høiby. Earlier, the lawyers had said that the situation was increasingly burdensome for their client and that the real effects of his detention were greater than publicly known. At Monday's hearing, a medical treatment provider and a person from the Norwegian prison service testified, and parts of the proceedings took place behind closed doors.

Background: verdict and custody since February

Høiby has been in pretrial detention since early February 2026. On 15 June 2026 he was sentenced to four years in prison after being convicted of two rapes and violence in a former relationship, while he was acquitted of two further rape charges. The verdict is not final, because he has appealed parts of it. From mid-July he has served his custody at home on the royal Skaugum estate, wearing an electronic ankle tag, after previously being held in a prison in Oslo. Before this ruling, his custody had been extended regularly by four weeks at a time. In the two months before 4 November 2026, following the death of his stepgrandfather King Harald, he had agreed to extensions of his detention, partly to protect his family.

Timeline and next steps

The sequence of decisions runs from the start of detention in February 2026 to the appeal ruling on 4 November, as shown below.

The appeal against the June verdict is set to begin in February 2027. That hearing will reopen the rape allegations and the domestic violence charges involving a former girlfriend. For now, Høiby remains in custody while the appeal process runs its course.