Victoria Beckham has spoken for the first time of the pain she suffered in the aftermath of the claims about her husband David’s alleged affair with Rebecca Loos.
Almost 20 years after it was claimed he and the personal assistant had become close while he was playing in Spain for Real Madrid, Mrs Beckham revealed that the months afterwards were the ‘hardest’ of her life and that she no longer felt like the couple ‘had each other’.
Meanwhile, Beckham admitted he still doesn’t know how they got through the 2003 crisis but he and his former Spice Girl wife knew they had to ‘fight for their family’, and said they felt like they were ‘drowning’ when their high-profile marriage was in the headlines for months.
The former England captain also told how he ‘felt physically sick every day’ as he and Mrs Beckham faced a battle to save their marriage.
Last week, the couple attended the London premiere of a four-part Netflix documentary, titled Beckham, which spans his life from his childhood through to his latest role as co-owner of US side Inter Miami.
Beckham and his designer wife, who was wearing a white trouser suit from her own label, were joined by their four children Brooklyn, Romeo, Cruz and Harper, as well as Brooklyn’s actress wife Nicola Peltz and Romeo’s model girlfriend Mia Regan.
Celebrities on the guest list included James Corden, Tana Ramsay, Gary Neville, Alexa Chung and Steve Bruce, and afterwards Beckham threw a lavish party at The Twenty Two club in Mayfair.
It all seemed a million miles away from the difficult days in Madrid, which friends of the couple say they decided to speak about because they wanted to appear authentic.
They also no longer feel they have ‘anything to prove’.
What was Victoria Beckham’s hardest time in marriage?
In a searingly honest interview in the fourth and final episode, Mrs Beckham, 49, appeared to fight back tears as she was asked if it was the hardest time in their marriage.
‘100 per cent,’ she confessed. ‘It was the hardest period for us. Because it felt like the world was against us.
‘Here’s the thing, we were against each other, if I’m being completely honest. 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.’
The crisis
Beckham, 48, stunned the world when his alleged relationship with Ms Loos were revealed in the now defunct News Of The World newspaper.
At the time Mrs Beckham had decided to remain in the UK so that her young sons Brooklyn and Romeo could stay in their schools.
The decision left Beckham lonely, and he admits that he struggled.
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He said: ‘When I first moved to Spain it was difficult because I had been part of a club and a family for my whole career, from the age of 15 to when I was 27. I get sold overnight, the next minute I’m in a city, I don’t speak the language. More importantly, I didn’t have my family.
‘Every time that we woke up we felt there was something else … we both felt at the time that we were not losing each other but drowning.’
How The Beckhams marriage survived
Asked how their marriage survived, Beckham told how he feared playing football while his wife struggled to find a way through their crisis.
Shaking his head, he said: ‘I don’t know how we got through it, in all honestly. 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.
‘And what we had was worth fighting for. There were some days that I would wake up and think, ‘How am I going to go to work? How am I going to walk on to that training pitch? How am I going to look as if nothing’s wrong?’ I felt physically sick every day when I opened my eyes, ‘How am I going to do this?’
The crisis prompted Mrs Beckham to relocate to Madrid, where they bought a £3million home which she says she decorated herself.
She later went on to have the couple’s third son, Cruz, now 18, in the Spanish capital.
Despite creating a base for her family in Madrid, she admits she was not happy with leaving the UK.
She said: ‘As soon as I could get the kids in school, we then move full-time. Did I resent David? If I am being totally honest, yes I did. It was probably, if I’m being honest, the most unhappy I have ever been in my life.
‘It wasn’t that I felt unheard because I chose to internalise a lot of it because I was always mindful of a focus that he needed.’
