Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | June 4, 2025
There’s trouble in paradise for the Beckham family. Well, so say the rumours, and the increasing number of stories covering this event with the pinpoint precision of the Watergate investigation. The first son of David and Victoria is trying to carve out an identity for himself independent of Golden Balls and Posh Spice, but right now, the big story is of a seeming feud that has torn the family apart. This is a narrative that feels like it kind of came from nowhere, and amid its rather mundane campaign of whispers and sources is a reminder of how modern gossip works in the age of likes and comments. Even the most boring people can become interesting this way.
Brooklyn Beckham — elephant photographer, bad chef, and sake investor - is married to Nicola Peltz, a bit-part actress and daughter of billionaire Trump pal and activist investor Nelson Peltz. While there were rumblings early on that the Beckhams didn’t like Peltz, the family still made a show of appearing at events together en masse, a united Beckham clan. But over the past few months, Brooklyn and Nicola have been notably absent from some big family events, such as David’s birthday celebrations. This caught the press’s attention because it was once super rare for any member of the clan to not be standing alongside them for the cameras. While the family was in France for Victoria’s Paris Fashion Week show, Brooklyn and Nicola were at Coachella.
One story claimed that the feud began because Brooklyn disapproved of his brother Romeo’s current girlfriend, Kim Turnbull. Some said that Brooklyn had once dated Kim but his other brother, Cruz, denied that. As the Peltz-Beckhams celebrated their 3rd wedding anniversary, eagle-eyed commenters noticed a lack of social media congratulations from the rest of the family. Then the sources started blabbing. The Sun started claiming that Nicola was too controlling and that Victoria was ever-so-worried about it. The Daily Mail said that Brooklyn was the instigator of the feud and that ‘David and Victoria are very concerned for their son and they have tried to get in touch but he isn’t interested […] He fears that his son won’t know that him and Victoria love him so dearly otherwise. It is a terribly sad situation.’ They also, somehow, dragged Meghan Markle into this, because they must have had a quota to meet that day.
According to a recent article from People (note the choice of an American publication here), the family drama came to a climax during the Peltz/Beckham wedding when the first dance went not to husband and wife but son and mother. The exclusive sources claim that singer Marc Antony, a friend of the Beckhams, sang at the reception and invited ‘the most beautiful woman in the room’ to dance with Brooklyn, but rather than his new wife, it was Victoria. This seems to have been sprung on the couple, and Nicola was, understandably, pretty furious about it. This is the kind of boy-mom nightmare we hear about constantly on TikTok. If you wanted the world to know why you might be mad at your parents for trying to get one over your new wife, this is a good one to share. But even then, you could blame this on a misunderstanding. Even the bombshell feels like a bit of a damp squib.
As you can see, this feels like a lot of molehills being categorized as mountains for the sake of #content. Nobody involved has said out loud that there are issues in the family because that’s just not done unless you’re being trailed by dozens of reality TV cameras. But that hasn’t stopped the press, especially on my side of the pond, from making this a daily story and inviting psychologists, body language experts, and counsellors to offer unsolicited advice on a thing that may or may not be real. But people are willing to invest in it because this is how celebrity gossip is done in 2025. It’s likes or no likes. Comments or no comments. Who’s included in the family photos. Who was at which event.
It’s easy to rag on Brooklyn Beckham, a nepo baby who has been famous since conception and has never been able to utilize those privileges to form an adult identity for himself. He’s tried his hand at a ton of hobbies, leapfrogging straight into being an “expert” in photography and cookery, even as the world mocks his depressingly amateur efforts. He doesn’t seem to know who he wants to be, an issue most of us have in our early 20s but are lucky enough to not have to work out in front of the world’s press. By the time his parents were his current age, they had created a Power Couple business built off the foundations of their entertainment and sports industry prowess. Marrying a fellow nepo baby, one from a far more monied parentage, was a solid move but it didn’t make him or Peltz more interesting. Frankly, this feud is the most fascinating he’s ever been.
And still, despite myself, I find that I have a strange kind of pathos for Brooklyn. Everything about his life from the moment his parents had sex in New York City onward has been not only press fodder but the building blocks of his parents’ brand. One of the reasons that David and Victoria’s coupling became such a big deal was that they worked overtime to make it so. Almost every part of their coupling was sold as an exclusive to magazines like OK! and Hello, like their engagement and hilariously tacky wedding. Their pregnancy announcements and first looks at their newborns made them a lot of money and earned a lot of press coverage. It was business, maybe a more lucrative one than being a Spice Girl or Golden Balls. Together, they crafted this brand that was dependent on using their kids as content. I remember when Brooklyn was born and how utterly inescapable that story was. To this day, the Beckham brand is heavily dependent on their image as a united family, the clan who powered through it to rise to the top (just ignore the cheating allegations and willingness to propagandize for a dictatorship for the right price.)
So, it must be weird to grow up in that world, knowing every milestone of your childhood and adolescence will be packaged into a magazine exclusive. It has to be surreal to come of age in that world, with all of those expectations on your shoulders, and then find yourself as a lost adult who has to keep up appearances so that your dad can land more advertising deals (and shill for the Qatari government.) When the time came for him to start his own family, I wonder if his parents panicked about potentially lost revenue. Did Victoria feel displaced by the arrival of Nicola, who didn’t need her money or fashion or approval?
I don’t want to lay on too much sympathy for these boring rich kids. Doing so tends to piss off many readers. I just think it’s worth noting how odd it must be to be someone like Brooklyn Beckham. Even in an era where the nepo baby is thriving, he isn’t, and he’s trying to form an identity that isn’t being an extension of his parents. It’s almost relatable, albeit most of us aren’t married to the daughter of an evil billionaire. But even being the in-law of a despot and the son of a shill doesn’t exclude you from being waylaid by jackassery.
This story has gotten a lot of coverage, probably more so than one would expect for a relatively private story with no real public drama. There are many headlines to mine from who unfollowed who and who didn’t like whose post. This is modern celebrity journalism, for better or worse (for worse, it’s just a whole lot worse and I’m so tired, guys.) For a family whose openness and willingness to sell it all for the press made them stars, their sudden caginess is undoubtedly interesting to those same outlets. So, everyone turns to decoding social media activity, as though they’re analysing the Zapruder footage frame by frame and hoping to crack the code. And it becomes a war of sources in the press. There seems to be an intriguing UK vs. US divide, with Brooklyn and his American wife getting more sympathetic write-ups from the Hollywood side and the parents going for the British publications that helped to make them stars. Frankly, if I knew that my parents were using the Daily Mail to call my wife a controlling shrew, I’d have strong feelings on that.
But still, this is a battle between rich jerks and nepo babies, a hilariously low-stakes drama that is ripe for conspiratorial thinking and red-string-on-a-board analyses. That’s why it’s gone so viral in spite of, let’s be honest, anything truly juicy. It’s like the Aimee Lou Wood and Walton Goggins story but with way less sex appeal. Let them fight until it becomes interesting, I suppose.
