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The Beckham family got blown apart on Jan. 19, when estranged son Brooklyn unleashed on his parents, David and Victoria, in a blistering 821-word diatribe.
On his Instagram Stories, the 26-year-old publicly confirmed the depth of his years-long rift with his famous folks — branding the family dynamic “performative,” “inauthentic,” a “façade” and even accusing his Posh Spice mom of dancing inappropriately at his 2022 wedding to Nicola Peltz Beckham, per The Gurardian.
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Most explosively, Brooklyn alleged his parents “have been trying endlessly to ruin my relationship” with Nicola “since before my wedding, and it hasn’t stopped.”
Brooklyn also made it crystal clear where he stands now. “I do not want to reconcile with my family,” he declared, pushing back at long-floated claims that he’s simply a puppet being manipulated by his actress heiress wife, 31. “I’m not being controlled,” he wrote. “I’m standing up for myself for the first time in my life.”
For friends of the family, the shock wasn’t just Brooklyn going public — it was that he went straight for the jugular of what David, 50, and Victoria, 51, have always protected most: their image. “David and Victoria are in a major crisis right now,” a source tells Globe.
The day after Brooklyn’s posts made headlines, David faced the media while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. When a reporter asked him directly about Brooklyn’s explosive statement, rather than defending Victoria, David kept walking.
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To friends in the Beckhams’ orbit, that moment was a gut punch as he failed to shield and defend Victoria, at whom Brooklyn aimed the bulk of his blame. “Whether David meant it or not, there’s a feeling amongst friends that he chose Brooklyn over Victoria,” says the source, “and it’s a colossal blow to the marriage as well as the family as a whole.”
Brooklyn went hard with his list of grievances. The overarching theme focused on how he says his parents have been “controlling narratives in the press” for his entire life. He accused them of staging “performative social media posts, family events and inauthentic relationships,” calling the image-consciousness “a fixture of the life I was born into.” He also alleged they placed “countless lies” in the media “to preserve” their own reputations at the expense of “innocent people.”
More than anything, “they want to be viewed as a fun-loving, tight-knit family,” continues the source, “so the fact they’ve now been exposed as dysfunctional is a real dagger to their brand.”
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Brooklyn’s post was also loaded with allegations of everything from financial control to wedding sabotage. “My parents repeatedly pressured and attempted to bribe me into signing away the rights to my name, which would have affected me, my wife, and our future children,” he wrote.
Victoria Beckham/Instagram
In an accusation that launched a thousand memes, Brooklyn also called out his former pop star mom’s behavior on his wedding day. “My mum hijacked my first dance with my wife … In front of our 500 wedding guests,” he wrote. “She danced very inappropriately on me in front of everyone. I’ve never felt more uncomfortable or humiliated in my entire life.”
Brooklyn’s account clashes with Vogue’s authorized reporting about the reception, including descriptions that framed the mother-son moment as something Brooklyn initiated long after he and Nicola had already shared their newlywed dance.
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Then there’s the dress. Brooklyn says Victoria “canceled making Nicola’s dress in the eleventh hour despite how excited she was to wear her design, forcing her to urgently find a new dress.” But Nicola and her stylist previously told Vogue she approached Valentino and spent a year working on her gown after Victoria learned her atelier wouldn’t be able to make one in time.
In the end, says the source, “Victoria comes across like a suffocating, meddling mom who had her claws out for Nicola from the beginning and clearly didn’t think she was good enough for her darling son.”