As we discussed in this week’s Gossip with Celebitchy podcast, I loved Netflix’s Beckham docuseries, a four-episode series about David Beckham’s career, fame, marriage and family. There were so many parts about Beckham’s career which I really didn’t know about, but some of the most fascinating aspects of the series were the parts about his marriage to Victoria, and how deeply he loves her. In the section where David had moved to Spain to play for Real Madrid, David and Victoria both talk about how Spain was the hardest part of their lives and their marriage. Director Fisher Stevens asks David, in an oblique way, about all of the “rumors” when he first moved to Madrid. David gets very emotional, but stops short of actually admitting his affair with Rebecca Loos or anyone else. He basically says that it was hard for him to be in Madrid without his family in the first year, and he cried when Fisher pressed him about how in the world his marriage survived that period. The truth is, David doesn’t know how his marriage survived – Victoria had every reason to leave him, but she stayed and he basically doesn’t know why she stayed, but he was grateful that she did. Well, of course the Mail got Rebecca Loos to give them an interview. I wonder how much they paid her.

Without referencing the liaison directly or admitting guilt – or indeed anything remotely inappropriate – Beckham, 48, says the stories were ‘horrible’ and left him ‘feeling sick every day’.

Rebecca, 47, shakes her head. ‘It’s all, “poor me”. He needs to take responsibility,’ she says, plaiting her fingers lest she might be tempted to punch the screen. ‘He can say whatever he likes of course and I understand he has an image to preserve, but he is portraying himself as the victim and he’s making me look like a liar, like I’ve made up these stories. He is indirectly suggesting that I’m the one who has made Victoria suffer.’

In truth, she would have rather he hadn’t spoken at all about what was, for her, a life-changing episode. To her mind, it was buried.

Long since happily married with two children, she has lived for the past 14 years in blissful obscurity in Norway where she teaches yoga and works as a medical assistant.

‘It’s not like England here, it’s much less judgmental,’ she says. ‘I used to get people coming up to me in Waitrose, right in my face, taking pictures of me with their mobiles. Here people are cool about it. They don’t care. Most of them [Norwegian friends] say, ‘Well, I was with a married man once and I did this…’ It’s like everyone has done something at some point.’

Not with married men as famous as Beckham though. And few would have faced as much opprobrium as Rebecca, the privately-educated Spanish-born diplomat’s daughter dubbed a ‘sleazy senorita’ and portrayed as sex-obsessed. She doubts whether society would judge a woman ‘so harshly’ today. Now, because of the documentary, she has been dragged back into the limelight. And despite living in the mountains, she is not beyond harassment, though reflecting different times, it now takes a new form – vicious trolling on social media.

Sitting in a quiet corner of a hotel in the centre of Oslo, Rebecca watches Beckham expressing wonder at how he and Victoria ‘got through’ the scandal and how he managed to drag himself to training with Real Madrid. Seeing his wife hurt, he says, was ‘incredibly difficult’. His eyes moisten. Rebecca has seen enough and turns away. This in fact is her second viewing.

‘Yes, the stories were horrible, but they’re true,’ she says. ‘He talks in the documentary about this ultimately being his private life, shutting it down. I think it’s one thing to keep your private life to yourself. It’s another thing to mislead the public. And so many people had forgotten about all of this. So many people put all this behind them, this whole affair, the scandal and everything. And he’s dragged it back up again in a way that is affecting my reputation…I think if he was going to touch on this time and how difficult it was, it would have been really nice for him to have said ‘it was not my proudest time’.

‘The worse bit for me is that he says he didn’t like seeing his wife suffer. That bothered me. Because he’s the one that’s caused the suffering. He could have simply said that this was a tough time and I don’t want to talk about it. ‘If you don’t want to take responsibility for things because of your family and your children that’s absolutely fine. And if he had just said it was a tough time for us and moved on I wouldn’t be here today. But he specifically made it look like… my fault, that he had nothing to do with this.’

[From The Daily Mail]

Yeah, this reminds me of the British media finding Prince Harry’s first lover and paying her to give multiple interviews and she repeatedly claimed that Harry violated her privacy, when really, he never named her or gave any details about her. Beckham didn’t name Loos in the series, although, obviously, people were well aware of that whole episode because of the tabloid reporting at the time, and because Loos herself sold her story and tried to launch a career out of being David Beckham’s mistress. I came away from that part of the docuseries as David taking ownership of his infidelities though, and both David and Victoria acknowledging that time period could have been the end for them. The fact that Rebecca Loos is still giving paid interviews and trying to act like the victim here is absurd.

Loos also gave a different paid interview to the Mail about one time, in Madrid, where she caught David sleeping with a Spanish model. Again, David kept it vague in the docuseries because – clearly – he was fooling around with multiple women, especially in the first year he was in Madrid.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.