In the strange and fast-moving world of online misinformation, a single picture can travel around the globe before the truth has even had a chance to stand up. That reality is now painfully familiar to Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise, who spent the past few days watching fake images of herself circulate online, images that showed her with a visible baby bump and her husband, Durek Verrett, holding a sonogram. The photographs appeared on social media late last week and were crafted with enough care to look authentic. They were not random pieces of digital art; they were intimate scenes, carefully staged to look like a private moment between a married couple overjoyed at the prospect of a child. It did not take long before rumours began to spread that the 55-year-old princess and her American-born shaman husband were expecting their first child together. Friends, followers and strangers weighed in, and for a while, the fabricated story was treated as a real one. Then came the backlash, not against the princess, but on her behalf. Her team issued a rare and forceful statement, calling the claims false and making clear that manipulated images of the royal were being taken seriously. “We are aware that false claims and manipulated images of Princess Märtha Louise are being spread on social media, and this is something we take seriously and are following up on,” her manager, Carina Scheele Carlsen, told the Norwegian broadcaster TV 2. It was a brief, carefully worded response, but it spoke volumes. For a woman who has spent decades in the public eye, this was a step too far. An invented pregnancy is not just a silly rumour; it is an invasion of the most personal kind, a digital violation of her body, her marriage and her happiness. By the time the posts were removed, the damage had been done, leaving behind an uncomfortable truth: in the age of artificial intelligence, anyone can be made to look like someone they are not.
The mechanics of the hoax are as worrying as the images themselves. The two Facebook pages that shared the photographs were written in Norwegian and German, a detail that suggests the deception was not confined to a single country or audience. Both pages were eventually removed by Meta, after the company determined that they had breached its guidelines on coordinated inauthentic behaviour. That phrase is significant: it implies that the fake pregnancy photos were not simply the work of a lone prankster, but part of a wider pattern of manipulation, possibly designed to test how easily fabricated content about a royal could be spread. TV 2, which had managed to capture screenshots before the posts disappeared, played a crucial role in exposing what had happened, and their reporting helped to stop the rumour in its tracks. But the episode leaves a troubling question hanging in the air: how many other fake images of real people are circulating at this very moment, waiting to be spotted? For every hoax that is caught and debunked, there may be dozens that slip through, quietly shaping public perception and poisoning the well of reality. The fact that it took an official denial from the princess’s own office to stop this one shows how easy it is for an unknown person, sitting behind a screen, to set the news agenda. In the past, a royal had to worry about unflattering photographs snapped by long-lens paparazzi. Now the threat is infinitely more personal, because the photographs are not taken at all; they are invented. And in this particular case, the invention was not harmless. It touched on one of the most private and profound questions in any couple’s life: whether they are going to have a child.
To understand why this story matters, it helps to understand who Märtha Louise is and how much of her life has already been scrutinised in public. She is the elder sister of Norway’s King Haakon VIII, who ascended to the throne on August 28 following the death of their father, the late King Harald V. As part of one of Europe’s most beloved royal families, she has always been recognisable, but she has also been one of its most unconventional figures. Long before she met Durek Verrett, she was known for her willingness to carve her own path away from the constraints of court life. Her marriage to Verrett, whom she wed in 2024 after a June 2022 engagement, only intensified the spotlight. Verrett describes himself as a shaman and healer, a world away from the buttoned-up world of royal protocol, and their relationship has been a source of endless public debate. The pair starred in the 2025 Netflix documentary Rebel Royals, which reignited calls for the princess to be stripped of her titles. Since stepping back from formal royal duties in November 2022, she has pursued commercial projects that have sometimes angered both the royal house and the Norwegian public. Yet despite all the criticism, she and Verrett remain central figures in the royal landscape. They are not peripheral celebrities; they are members of a family that, for better or worse, belongs to the nation. That is why the fake pregnancy images felt like more than just a silly internet rumour. They were an attack on a woman’s dignity, made worse by the fact that much of her adult life has already been lived under the unforgiving gaze of the press and the public. To fabricate a pregnancy is to touch something intimate, and to do it with artificial intelligence makes the violation feel even colder.
This is not the first time that Norwegian royals have found themselves at the centre of an AI-generated nightmare. In June, only a few months before the recent incident, fake images of King Haakon and Queen Mette-Marit were circulated online. Those images showed Mette-Marit in hospital following her lung transplant, portrayed as being comforted by her husband, now King Haakon, and their daughter, Crown Princess Ingrid Alexandra. A second image showed Mette-Marit being held by her son, Marius Borg Høiby. The photographs must have seemed painfully plausible, given the family’s very real medical ordeal, but they were, in fact, artificial. They were removed after coming to light, but not before they had made their point: anyone, no matter how important or protected, can be turned into the subject of a digital fiction. The fact that the fakes involved a health crisis, one of the most vulnerable and painful moments a family can endure, gives a chilling insight into the motives behind such campaigns. It is not enough to make a royal look ridiculous; the images need to exploit real human suffering in order to be believed. What happened to Mette-Marit was not simply a breach of privacy. It was a calculated attempt to use an authentic tragedy as the foundation for a completely false story. And it is precisely that kind of manipulation that makes deepfakes so insidious: they do not just invent new realities, they twist the ones that already exist, turning genuine love and pain into props for a lie.
The problem extends far beyond Norway. All across Europe, royal families are being forced to grapple with the strange and unsettling consequences of deepfake technology. Earlier this year, a network of misinformation campaigns against Britain’s royal family was exposed, including a particularly bizarre claim that King Charles had secretly converted to Islam in the lead-up to a state visit to the United States. Other accounts have circulated AI-generated images of Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, and their children, falsely claiming that the couple actually had four children instead of three. Perhaps even more cruel are the computer-generated images of Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis meeting their late grandmother, Princess Diana, who died years before they were born. These images touch an obvious emotional nerve, blending nostalgia, grief and curiosity into something that feels dangerously real, even when it is entirely invented. One such image, showing a young Prince William and Catherine at university in 2004, even fooled Grant Harrold, a former butler to King Charles. Harrold, who worked at Highgrove from 2004 to 2011, later admitted he had “genuinely mistook” the photograph for a real one and shared it with his Instagram followers before apologising for the mistake. If a person with direct experience of royal life can be deceived, what hope is there for the average social media user? Last year, the Belgian royal family was forced to issue its own statement after AI-generated images of Princess Elisabeth and another young royal began circulating online, sparking rumours of a romance that the palace was quick to deny. The pattern is the same everywhere: a fake image appears, a story begins to form, and the people involved have to waste time and energy correcting a narrative that should never have existed in the first place.
Perhaps the most troubling thing about this new wave of misinformation is how difficult it is to fight. Even after a photograph has been debunked, even after the posts have been deleted and the accounts removed, the image itself often remains seared into the public memory. For the person at the centre of the deception, there is no easy way to undo the feeling of being violated. Princess Märtha Louise issued her statement and moved on, at least outwardly, but the emotional toll cannot be measured. She is not just a symbol or a royal institution; she is a 55-year-old woman who has lived her entire life in the public eye, who has faced criticism and controversy, and who now has to wonder what other false images are being created about her at this very moment. Her decision to speak out, however briefly, was a reminder that behind every royal headline there is a human story. The battle against deepfakes is not ultimately about technology. It is about protecting the basic right of every person, famous or not, to have their own reality respected. It is about refusing to let anonymous creators rewrite someone’s life with a few clicks of a mouse. As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and easier to access, the threat will only grow. But perhaps there is something to be learned from the quiet, dignified response of the Norwegian palace. They did not feed the frenzy. They did not provide the gossip-hungry public with more details. They simply said, in effect, that this was false, that it was being dealt with, and that they would not allow themselves to be drawn into a game of digital make-believe. That might not stop the next deepfake. But it does set a boundary—one that says, clearly and firmly, that some things are too precious to be mocked, too personal to be faked, and too important to be left unchallenged.