David and Victoria Beckham are no strangers to foul play, and the power couple became so far apart that they leaked negative stories about each other to the media, the author claims.
The “media war” broke out eight years ago after allegations emerged that David had an affair with his personal assistant Rebeccas Loos.
The relationship between the Beckhams continued to be so fractured that it had degenerated into simply a “distant business relationship,” British author Tom Bower said ahead of the book’s release The Beckham house.
A particular moment of contention between the couple occurred in 2018, when David appeared on The Sunday Project and called their marriage “hard work”. Victoria was not informed of what would be discussed during the interview, and Bower stated that she was “in disbelief” after watching it.
“It was like an atomic bomb went off,” Bower said Mirror.
“She was surprised by her husband’s disloyalty. His truthfulness thwarted her efforts to paint a picture of happy families. Why, she sobbed, would David embarrass her?
“Worse still, why couldn’t he understand the consequences of his own stupidity? Why, she lamented, had he become the enemy of her ambition? Without answering, she fled to a spa hotel in Baden-Baden for two days.
The author claims that Victoria’s publicist leaked a story to a reporter about how the former Spice Girl felt filled with “rage and recrimination” when she learned about what her husband said in the interview.
She was then seen crying in Australia.
David told The Project after being asked about the secret to his relationship’s success: “When you’ve been married for as long as we have, it’s always hard work. It gets a little more complicated.”
David, who spoke to project host Lisa Wilkinson, said the focus was on their children.
“I think marriage, marriage is always about hard work,” he replied.
“You know your children – they want your time and deserve your time, and we are hard workers and we feel that this is the right way to raise our children to prove and show them that you actually have to work hard to succeed.”
Referring to the media war between the pair, Bower wrote: “Reflecting the acrimony between the Beckhams, both publicists began competing rather than cooperating to promote their own client. They both fed negative stories about the other side to their favorite tabloid journalists.”
Another such story involved a family vacation during which Victoria reportedly told her children, “daddy’s not a cheater.”
The couple’s relationship became more strained in 2016, with Victoria living in London with her children while building her fashion brand and David working in Miami.
“During London Fashion Week that year, she asked Beckham to come back to London for dinner… By the end of the celebration, she must have wished he had stayed in America. “Some whispered that the two had gotten into a nasty fight earlier.”
Bower wrote that David was seen flying to New York later than night.
The following year the tensions were even greater, this time at Glastonbury, when David arrived with his entourage the day before and partied with the models until 5am.
“She and her entourage drove a golf cart through the neglected campers to the VIP area. She was furious that her husband was not returning her calls,” Bower writes.
“David finally showed up. Within seconds, they were in a heated argument.”
The Beckhams, who have a combined net worth of $778 million, were together for one main reason.
“They stuck together to support the brand (sic),” writes Bower.
The couple also revealed their marital problems in the Netflix docuseries Beckham, which follows David’s meteoric rise from working-class origins to world-class football stardom. Victoria confessed that they “were against each other” at their worst, while David said; “I don’t know how we got through it.”