It’s the moment from the Beckham documentary that everyone is talking about. For the first time, David and Victoria speak openly about the effect on their marriage of his alleged affair with Rebecca Loos in 2004. A tearful Victoria describes it as “the worst time in my life” and David says he “felt physically sick every day”.
Loos is never mentioned by name, but this revisiting of the scandal has shone a light on how the then 26-year-old Dutch PA was treated by both the press and the court of public opinion. She was a young woman who allegedly had an affair with her married boss. He bounced back unscathed while she was slut-shamed. Just like Monica Lewinsky and Pamela Anderson before her, Loos was a casualty of a more misogynistic time.
“I think there are definitely parallels to be made,” says Rachel Richardson, a media consultant and former tabloid journalist who writes the weekly culture newsletter Highly Flammable. “You forget what a unique role the Beckhams played in our society in the Noughties and how powerful they were. We’d all been spoonfed the idea that they had a perfect relationship, so any young woman calling that into question was kind of like a David (the other one) going up against Goliath.”
When grainy pictures of Loos and Beckham outside a Madrid nightclub were captured by The News Of The World, Loos was catapulted to instant notoriety. In a deal negotiated by Max Clifford she sold her story and went on to make a reported £1 million from interviews and TV appearances. David called the allegations “ludicrous”, but in the wake of Loos many other women came forward with similar claims. This was towards the end of the “kiss and tell girl” era, when women who had slept with high-profile men could sell their stories to the tabloid press, complete with a scantily-clad photoshoot.
“Rebecca Loos was one of the last great kiss and tell stories,” says PR expert Mark Borkowski. “Back in those days, you’d get millions of eyeballs on the Sunday papers, and these headline splashes were real watercooler moments. Looking back now, Rebecca Loos was definitely treated badly. Beckham remained Saint David and she was painted as this scarlet woman. She might have come out of it with a bit of money, but her reputation and her private life was carved up forever.”
Loos, branded the “Sleazy Senorita” by the press, didn’t really fit the model of the typical kiss and tell girl. “Most of them were young models looking to further their career via a one-night stand in a nightclub with a celebrity,” says Richardson. “But Loos wasn’t playing that game, she was a diplomat’s daughter, she was bilingual, she was privately-educated, she had this trusted role with the Beckham family. And yet once this story broke it defined her. She could either choose obscurity or go down the money-making conveyor belt like other kiss and tell girls and do glamour modelling shoots for Nuts and Zoo magazine, go on reality TV and turn up on red carpets in small outfits.”
Richardson says that tabloid journalists would go to extreme lengths to protect their kiss and tell girl exclusives: “Loos would’ve been kept under lock and key in a hotel or a villa somewhere where no other journalists could get to her.”
Loos was certainly dragged through the mud, quite literally when she went on the Channel 5 reality show The Farm, where she had to pleasure a pig. She also claims that Clifford suggested she make a sex tape to earn another £1 million, which she declined. She has said: “For me it was never about the money. It was about the truth; about being honest.”
The media landscape has changed now, and kiss and tell girl stories are a relic of a bygone era. “There’s just not the same money on the table now,” says Borkowski. “These young women used to be able to buy a house and disappear but it’s not the same any more.”
Loos would’ve been kept under lock and key in a hotel or a villa somewhere where no other journalists could get to her
Richardson points to changing privacy laws keeping sexual scandals off the front pages. “It would be almost impossible for a story like this to break now because of super injunctions,” she says. “It’s more likely that it would come out on social media first, as we saw with the allegations about Adam Levine.”
We all like to think that things have moved on from the Noughties, but would Loos be treated any differently today? PR guru Jack Freud doesn’t think so. “The way some of the British press vilified Rebecca Loos over her alleged affair with David Beckham seemed to be a telling reflection of society as a whole,” he says. “She was the one cast as a homewrecker, and judged for her decisions despite the fact that he was the married man. Eventually, after months of derision, her allegations were pretty much dismissed. Whilst I would like to think things had changed, I fear it probably wouldn’t be a dissimilar situation should the same thing happen again today.”
Richardson agrees. “You only have to look at the online comments about women in the public eye to see that those sexist tropes of ‘she’s a gold digger’ or ‘she’s a scheming slut who trapped him’ are still out there,” she says.
Nearly 20 years on, Brand Beckham is worth a reported £425 million and the couple appear stronger than ever. Loos, meanwhile, lives in Norway, where she’s married to a doctor, has two children and works as a yoga teacher. But whatever happens in her life, she’ll forever be known in relation to David Beckham. In 2013, Loos said she was “foolish” to sell her story in the way she did. But maybe we were also foolish — and cruel — to shame her for being “The Other Woman”.
