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Princess Märtha Louise of Norway and her boyfriend Shaman Durek Verrett recently sat down for their first joint American TV interview. The couple appeared on Tamron Hall last Friday during which they opened up about their relationship, revealing that they met through a mutual friend.
“We came to his house for lunch and I walked in the door and I looked at him and I saw into his eyes and I was like I know you already, and he’s like ‘Oh we were meant to meet way before we were born,’” King Harald V and Queen Sonja’s daughter recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh God, another LA man.’”
She added, “I was like rolling my eyes internally because I’m very polite, you know, I’m a Princess, so I’m very polite.”
However, Shaman Durek doesn’t remember saying that. He explained to host Tamron Hall, “What happened was when she walked in the door I just looked into her eyes and I saw an image of another lifetime that we were together. I saw myself sitting on a throne in Egypt and she was next to me and I heard her voice say to me ‘I found you,’ so I was in shock. So this thing just came out of my mouth and she kept telling me for years that you said this and I didn’t even remember.”
The couple went public with their relationship on Instagram in 2019. Märtha told Tamron, “We chose to go out with our love on Instagram to own our story because my whole life has been in the press since I was zero years old and so I have been through a lot of times where the press have decided my story instead of me choosing how I want to present it, and so that was actually really nice when we could actually choose that. Although it was a bit shocking, I think.”
During the sit-down, Shaman Durek acknowledged that there have been death threats since he and the Norwegian royal announced their romance. When asked where he believes the aggression comes from, he replied, “You know, going into her life being a person of dark skin, a person who represents the melanated skin tone, being a shaman, a lot of people don’t like the idea and a lot of the messages I would get from people around the world would be, they didn’t want us together and it came from both sides. And she said to me, “If you don’t want to be in this, we can leave. I’m okay. This is the life of a royal. Anyone who comes into my life and my family, this is what they go through,’ and I looked in her eyes and she was crying and I said, ‘I will go through the fire with you. I will go through the ice with you. I will go through anything that’s thrown at us because our love can withstand anything.’
He continued, “I think it’s about educating people and helping people understand interracial relationships and how we are bringing, understanding that fear is the big issue of why racism and all these things continue and we have to move past those things so that we can evolve as a species.”
In the interview, the sixth generation shaman also revealed that his mother, who is half Norwegian, was told that her son would one day marry into the royal family, and informed Durek of this when he was 15 years old. Märtha’s boyfriend said, “[My mom is] like live your life, do what you want, you’re going to be married in the royal family and your person you’re going to be with is the Princess of Norway.”