Rebecca Loos was still at the party when Victoria Beckham called. It was late September 2003, a birthday celebration at Ronaldo Nazรกrio’s mansion outside Madrid, and David Beckham had stopped answering his own phone. Don’t hang up, Victoria said. Go and find him.
Loos went upstairs and found two of Beckham’s bodyguards posted outside a closed bedroom door. She told one of them his wife was on the line. The bodyguard went inside. Beckham came out. Behind him, through the door before it closed, she said she could see a woman lying on the bed.
She handed him the phone. “Your wife,” she said.
Loos gave that account to the Daily Mail in October 2023, twenty years after it allegedly happened. She told versions of it to the News of the World in 2004, to Sky News shortly after, and to 60 Minutes Australia in March 2025. The details have not changed.
Whether David Beckham had an affair has never been settled in a courtroom. What the record does show is that five women made specific, published allegations against him between 2004 and 2012, that the Beckhams lost a High Court bid to suppress one of those stories, and that Beckham later filed a $25 million lawsuit over an entirely different set of claims while never once taking legal action against the woman whose account he has been calling ludicrous for more than twenty years.
Table of Contents
The Short Version
- Alleged affair period: September to December 2003, during Beckham’s first season at Real Madrid
- Story published: April 4, 2004, News of the World
- Beckham’s public denial since 2004: described all allegations as “ludicrous”
- Four other women made allegations between 2004 and 2012
- The Beckhams lost a 2004 High Court injunction attempt over a related story
- Beckham filed a $25 million US lawsuit over separate claims in 2010; the case was dismissed
- Rebecca Loos’s most recent public statement: 60 Minutes Australia, March 30, 2025
How the Rebecca Loos Affair Allegations Became Public
David Beckham left Manchester United for Real Madrid in July 2003. Victoria and their sons Brooklyn and Romeo stayed in England. For a significant stretch of that first year in Spain, Beckham was living largely alone.
Rebecca Loos, a 26-year-old Dutch personal assistant, was hired through his management company SFX to handle his daily life in Madrid. The role was all-consuming. She later described herself as the first person the Beckhams saw in the morning and the last at night.
The Beckhams’ marriage had faced scrutiny before any of this. In her 2001 autobiography Learning to Fly, Victoria had written about rumours that David kissed another woman in 1998 while she was pregnant with Brooklyn. She said she punched him when she next saw him. By the time David moved to Madrid in 2003, the marriage had already had at least one public test.
In September 2003, photographs emerged of Beckham at a Madrid nightclub with a brunette. The woman was later identified as Loos. In April 2004, after her employment was terminated, Loos sold her story to the News of the World. The paper published it on April 4. She claimed a four-month affair between September and December 2003, involving four sexual encounters and daily text message exchanges. Some of those messages were also published by the paper.
In her first television interview, on Sky News with presenter Kay Burley, Loos said: “It was wrong to do what I did, I know that, but it did happen and I’m not going to live a lie for the rest of my life.”
Beckham responded the same day. His statement to The Guardian read: “During the past few months I have become accustomed to reading more and more ludicrous stories about my private life. The simple truth is that I am 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.”
He did not file a lawsuit.
What Rebecca Loos Has Said About the Beckham Affair
Loos’s specific allegation centres on a hotel invitation, a night when Victoria was out of town, and a four-month period during which she says David sent her text messages for up to thirty minutes a day. She told 60 Minutes Australia in 2025: “The way he looks at you, he has a certain charismatic power. He can easily get what he wants and he knows it.” She said she fell for what she described as every cliche line he fed her.
She also acknowledged something more complicated about her decision to go public. “When you’re 26 years old,” she said in the same interview, “it’s how you react to heartache and pain.” She admitted she had partly wanted to make him feel some pain too.
Her account of the Ronaldo party, told to the Daily Mail in October 2023, remains the most specific thing she has ever said publicly about that period. Beckham has never addressed it directly.
In her March 2025 60 Minutes Australia interview, twenty-one years after the original story, she said:
“I have stuck to the truth. I’ve never exaggerated. I never lied about a single thing. Why? Because I’m going up against the strongest, most powerful couple in the media who have all the money in the world for the best PR, the best lawyers. And all I had on my side was the truth.”
Five Other Women Made Allegations Against David Beckham
Loos was not the only person to come forward. Four other women made public allegations between 2004 and 2012, and a fifth, Katherine Jenkins, was the subject of rumours she denied herself.
| Name | Year | Background | Allegation | Beckham’s Response |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sarah Marbeck | 2004 | Model | Affair from 2001, Manchester United era; claimed two years of explicit texts | “Absurd and unsubstantiated” |
| Celina Laurie | 2004 | Details not publicly established | Claimed a 2002 encounter; told The People: “He’s the one who should have shown restraint. I’m sure I wasn’t the first.” | Denied |
| Dannielle Heath | 2004 | Beauty therapist, 22 | Claimed two encounters at the family’s Madrid home | “Completely and totally untrue” |
| Irma Nici | 2010 | Former sex worker | Claimed five paid encounters in New York and London in 2007 | Filed $25 million lawsuit; denied under oath |
| Katherine Jenkins | 2012 | Welsh singer | No direct claim; Twitter rumours only | Both Jenkins and Beckham denied |
The Dannielle Heath story requires specific context. When the News of the World prepared to publish her account in 2004, the Beckhams went to the High Court to stop it. The judge refused, ruling the story was in the public interest. Victoria was pregnant with Cruz at the time. Their joint statement read: “We are sick and tired of people trying to make money out of our family. It is even more distressing when we are expecting our third child soon. The allegations are completely and totally untrue and the matters are now in the hands of our lawyers.”
Katherine Jenkins’s situation was different from every other woman on this list. She put out her own denial on Twitter in August 2012, stating she had met Beckham twice in group settings, had never been alone with him, and had never arranged to meet him privately. She described the rumours as “very hurtful, untrue” and said her lawyers considered them actionable.
David Beckham’s Denials and the Full Legal Record
Across all of these allegations, Beckham’s public position has been consistent: every claim is false. His legal responses, however, have not followed the same pattern.
When Loos’s story ran in 2004, he denied it verbally and took no legal action against her or the News of the World. When the Dannielle Heath story followed, the Beckhams sought a court injunction and lost. When Irma Nici’s allegations were published by In Touch magazine in the United States in September 2010, Beckham filed a $25 million lawsuit in the Superior Court of California against Bauer Publishing, the magazine’s editor, Nici personally, and others.
In that lawsuit, he submitted a sworn declaration stating: “I have never met Nici, let alone committed adultery or paid her for sex,” and denied each specific allegation individually. The US case was dismissed. Federal Judge Manuel Real ruled that as a public figure, Beckham had not proved the magazine acted with actual malice. The magazine’s lawyer argued to the court that Nici’s allegations were “entirely consistent with Beckham’s reputation.” Beckham won a separate action in Germany, where courts apply a different legal standard.
He has never filed a lawsuit against Rebecca Loos. His description of her account as ludicrous has not changed since the day it was first published.
What Victoria Beckham Said About the Affair
Victoria Beckham spent nearly twenty years avoiding specific comment on the affair allegations in public. In the 2023 Netflix documentary Beckham, released on October 4 of that year, she addressed that period for the first time on camera. Neither she nor David referred to Loos, or to any of the other women, by name.
Her account from the documentary:
“You know, up until Madrid sometimes it felt like us against everybody else but we were together, we were connected, we had each other. But when we were in Spain, it didn’t really feel like we had each other either. And that’s sad. I can’t even begin to tell you how hard it was and how it affected me. It was a nightmare. It was an absolute circus and everyone loves it when the circus comes to town, right? Unless you’re in it.”
When the documentary’s director asked if she had resented David during that period, she said: “If I’m being totally honest, yes, I did. It was the most unhappy I have ever been in my entire life.”
David, in the same documentary: “I don’t know how we got through it, in all honesty. Victoria is everything to me. To see her hurt was incredibly difficult. But we’re fighters, and at that time we needed to fight for each other, we needed to fight for our family.”
In October 2025, appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast, Victoria was asked how she and David had handled years of speculation about their marriage. She said they had ridden the storm. She used the phrase “the damn storm.” Then she changed the subject to her eating disorder, and the interview moved on.
Rebecca Loos in 2025, Brooklyn Beckham in 2026
On March 30, 2025, Loos sat for a full interview with 60 Minutes Australia, the most substantial she had given in years. She was 47. She was living in Norway, married to a doctor named Sven Christjar Skaiaa, working as a yoga and meditation teacher. The interview covered the original allegations, the Netflix documentary’s effect on how her account was received, and her reasons for staying with the same story for two decades.
The interview drew wide attention because of its timing, coming shortly after the Netflix documentary had reintroduced the story to a new audience, and because Loos addressed something she had never said quite so plainly before: that she found Beckham’s framing of himself as a victim of the media deeply frustrating. “There were loads of horrible stories about me, and about Victoria,” she said. “But never David. Nothing changed in his life. He kept everything.”
On January 19, 2026, Brooklyn Beckham published a six-page statement on Instagram. He accused his parents of spending his entire life “controlling narratives in the press” and placing what he described as “countless lies in the media, mostly at the expense of innocent people, to preserve their own facade.” The statement was about his own estrangement from his family and made no reference to Loos or to the affair allegations.
Loos drew the reference herself. In a clip recorded for Channel 5’s documentary The Beckham Feud: Truth and Lies, which aired on February 1, 2026, she said: “In a very small way, this is, of course, validation for what I came forward and said 22 years ago. Brooklyn is basically confirming inauthentic relationships, valuing promotions and endorsements over all else and that it’s all focused on Brand Beckham and that’s all that matters.”
David Beckham co-owns Inter Miami CF and in 2023 released a Netflix documentary that brought his account of the affair period to a global audience. Rebecca Loos teaches yoga in Norway. She has maintained the same account since she was 26 years old and has shown no sign of changing it. The full record does not settle whether David Beckham cheated on his wife. What it does settle is what happens to a story when one person in it has the resources to ensure it stays managed rather than resolved.
