Norway’s ambassador to Jordan and Iraq, Mona Juul, resigned from her duties on Sunday following reports of alleged links to Jeffrey Epstein, the latest casualty in the Nordic country from the widening scandal around the deceased convicted sex offender.

“Juul’s contact with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein revealed a serious lapse in judgment,” Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said in a statement Monday announcing Juul’s resignation. “The situation makes it difficult to restore the trust that the role requires.”

In the statement, the ministry said that “documents related to Epstein have revealed several details concerning Mona Juul,” without providing more specifics. The ministry said it has opened an investigation “into Juul’s knowledge of and contact with Epstein.”

“We need to determine whether the relationship impacted her work as a diplomat,” Eide said in the statement.

Norwegian media reported that Juul’s husband, Terje Rød-Larsen, had dinner with Epstein in Paris in June 2019, just weeks before Epstein’s arrest by U.S. authorities on sex trafficking charges. The media reports referred to emails in the latest tranche of files released by the U.S. Justice Department, where it says: “Jeffrey says he will meet with Terje and Thornborn (how do you spell this name?!) in Paris on Thursday June 20th.”

The names of Juul, her husband and former Council of Europe Secretary-General Thorbjørn Jagland appear several times in the Epstein emails released by the U.S. government.

“Mona Juul will first and foremost account for her contact with Jeffrey Epstein to her employer, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” Juul’s lawyer, Thomas Skjelbred, said in a statement sent to journalists Friday evening. “This will take place during the coming week,” he added.

“It’s important to understand the extent of her contact with Epstein in her capacity as an employee of the ministry,” Eide said in Monday’s statement. “Juul will continue dialogues with the ministry so that the case is clarified and we can determine whether her previous explanations align with the new information.”

Juul is a former politician for Norway’s Labour Party. She and her husband played a key role in negotiating the Oslo Accords, the interim peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1990s.

Media reports in late January said that Epstein had intended to leave $5 million each to the couple’s two children in a change to his will made after his arrest in the summer of 2019, shortly before his death in prison in August 2019.

Several other prominent Norwegians have appeared in the Epstein files, including Crown Princess Mette-Marit and World Economic Forum President and former Foreign Minister Børge Brende. Appearance in the files does not in itself imply wrongdoing or illegal behavior.

Politico

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