We watched with thinly veiled envy as this loved up couple teased each other and danced together in the Netflix documentary, Beckham. 

But if claims in a new book are to be believed, David and Victoria Beckham were once engaged in a stealthy slander battle, using the media to spread dirt on each other.

According to Tom Bower, author of the upcoming book, The House of Beckham, the cracks started to appear eight years ago. 

But the author says the pair’s relationship had become little more than a “distant business relationship”, after David was accused of sleeping with his personal assistant Rebecca Loos. 

Their so-called “media war” was triggered by an interview with David Beckham on The Sunday Project in 2018, says Bower.

In the interview, David called their marriage “hard work”, leaving Victoria in “disbelieve” according to the author. 

“When you’ve been married for the amount of time that we have, it’s always hard work. It becomes a little more complicated,” he told host Lisa Wilkinson when asked about the secret to his marriage success.

“I think marriage, marriage is always about hard work,” he said.

“You know your children — they want your time and they deserve your time, and we are hardworking, and we feel that is the right way to bring up our children to prove and to show to them that actually, you have to work hard to be successful.”

Bower told The Mirror Victoria’s response was like a “nuclear bomb had gone off”. 

“Her husband’s disloyalty baffled her. His truthfulness had destroyed her efforts to conjure up an image of happy families. Why, she sobbed, would David embarrass her?

“Worse still, why could he not understand the consequence of his own stupidity? Why, she wailed, had he become the enemy of her ambition? Without any answers, she fled to a Baden-Baden spa hotel for two days.”

That’s when allegedly things became nasty.

Driven by rage, Bower claims Victoria instructed her publicist to leak a story to the media.

“Reflecting the acrimony between the Beckhams, the two publicists began to compete rather than collaborate to promote their own client. Both fed negative stories about the other side to their favourite tabloid journalists,” Bower said. 

Another leaked story included inside information about Victoria’s conversation with her children, reportedly telling them, “daddy’s not a cheat”.

According to the author, signs of trouble started in 2016, when the pair were split between London and Miami.

“During London Fashion Week that year, she asked Beckham to return to London for a dinner … By the end of the celebration she must have wished he had stayed in America. Some whispered that the two had been embroiled earlier in a foul-mouthed row,” Bower writes, claiming David then took off on a flight to New York. 

The following year, according to the book, David arrived early for a scheduled trip to Glastonbury, opting to party all night with a bunch of models. 

“With her entourage she headed in a golf buggy through the scruffy campers to the VIP zone. She was furious that her husband had failed to reply to her telephone calls,” Bower writes.

“Eventually, David appeared. Within seconds, they were embroiled in a ferocious argument.”

In fact, things were so bad, according to Bower, that David and Victoria only stayed together for their multi-million dollar ‘brand’.  

In the Netflix doco, Victoria opened up about the “unhappiest time” in her life — when her husband was accused of having an affair with Loos.

In 2004, five years into the Beckhams’ marriage, Loos worked as David’s assistant while he was playing for Real Madrid in Spain. After leaving the job, she gave an interview to the News of the World claiming they’d had a four-month affair.

At the time, he called the story “ludicrous” and said the “simple truth” was that he was “very happily married”.

“I have a wonderful wife and two very special kids. There is nothing any third party can do to change these facts.”

Victoria said that coping with the affair rumours was challenging, but she did “internalise a lot of it”. 

Despite the allegations being towards David, Victoria said she was the one who often copped the most negative press.

“I on the other hand more often than not, I was the villain,” she told the docuseries. 

Neither of the Beckhams has commented following the new allegations levelled in Bower’s book. Watch this space.

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Source: Los Angeles Times