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For months, it has become more and more apparent that Brooklyn, the eldest son in Britain’s other royal family, the Beckhams, no longer intends to associate himself with his parents and siblings. But now, in a statement posted over several Instagram Stories, he has decided the time has come to set the record straight and finally acknowledge the elephant in the room, so hard to photograph but incredible to see. According to Beckham, the Beckhams are not the perfect family they would have us believe they are, and his life has consisted of being manipulated and controlled by his parents in the service of presenting a shiny, happy facade. “My family values public promotion and endorsements above all else,” he wrote. “Brand Beckham comes first.”
Fighting talk. These Stories, naturally, have shot straight into group chats around the country, then into the gossip pages and beyond. They require a little bit of context, so here is a brief timeline of the events that got the Beckhams here.
Brooklyn Beckham, Victoria and David’s oldest son at 26, has made a name for himself as a sort of affable failson. It’s an old story: A child of wealth doesn’t experience enough friction in pursuing their desires and so never develops resilience, grit, the capacity for hard work, all that kind of thing. But even allowing for that, Beckham has racked up a remarkable number of pivots for a 26-year-old. We all remember the photography era, and the associated 2017 book. He has also been a football hopeful, a model, a “brand ambassador,” a race car driver, a chef on his Instagram show Cookin’ With Brooklyn, a sake and hot sauce entrepreneur. Some six years ago, Beckham started dating Nicola Peltz, the daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, who is best known for writing, directing, and starring in a film about a pregnant, drug-addicted teenage stripper that received, shall we say, mixed reviews. They got married in 2022, and stories have been going around for a while about how it came to be that Peltz did not wear a Victoria Beckham–designed dress at the wedding, the real story behind which we will probably never know, despite each woman giving different accounts.
For a couple of years after the wedding, things seemed superficially fine between the Peltz-Beckhams and the other Beckhams, turning up to one another’s events and posting happily on Instagram about each other. Then, in May 2025, neither Beckham nor Peltz attended David Beckham’s 50th birthday, and in August, the couple renewed their vows without any of Beckham’s immediate family present. In December, it came to the attention of people who keep an eye on this kind of thing that neither Victoria nor David was following Beckham on Instagram anymore, and the Daily Mail ran an article about it that prompted Cruz Beckham, the third child, to respond—again, on Instagram—that his parents would never unfollow Beckham and, instead, all the other Beckhams “woke up blocked” by Beckham. It is now thought that Beckham blocked his family because Victoria liked a video of him cooking some chicken on Instagram, to his mind violating a cease-and-desist letter he sent to his parents to prevent his family from interacting with his social media accounts or posting images of him on their own. Then these Stories last night on, you guessed it, Instagram.
Beckham’s complaints about his parents focus largely on their fakeness and desire for good PR over meaningful family relationships, but he also accuses them of repeatedly trying to sabotage his marriage and disrespecting Peltz. At their wedding, Beckham writes, Victoria hijacked the slot intended for the couple’s first dance, and—in one of the most load-bearing prepositions ever deployed—he describes his mum as having danced on him, to his enormous embarrassment. Victoria apparently also refused to aid Peltz in helping support displaced peop—no, sorry, dogs—after the Los Angeles fires. There has been no official response yet from camp Beckham, although “a source” has told a tabloid here that Victoria is “in pieces” over it, which, well, anyone would be, and David has made oblique references today on a podcast appearance to “mistakes” his kids have made with social media.
Lower-budget versions of this sort of rift happen in families all the time, of course. The eldest child in a close-knit family starts to feel that, as an adult, he should have a greater sense of independence. A mum has complicated feelings about her firstborn son’s marriage. Someone cares too much about dogs. The difference is that because of how the Beckhams choose to live, all of this is happening in full view of millions of strangers.
On the one hand, the family has had to get good at what Beckham calls “controlling the narrative” because they are so famous, and on the other, they could in fact have lived a more private life than they’ve chosen to. It was not a matter of necessity for either the Beckham docuseries or the Victoria Beckham documentary to get made. Agreeing to participate in these specials was a means of polishing their image and courting attention, at root. It is going to be difficult for the Beckhams to hit the “Respect Our Privacy” button on this one, because they do not live in a private manner. Everything they have was bought and paid for by living in the public eye. They are all posting relentlessly on Instagram.
Beckham reportedly wanted any family reconciliation to happen privately. But he has inevitably made an own goal here by dragging the conflict back into the court of public opinion. I’m sure that being a member of a family that is also a brand is unpleasant. “Family love is decided by how much you post on social media,” he wrote on his Stories. But he has bought into the circus by litigating his family drama on … social media. Maybe being that famous for so long does just warp your perspective irrevocably, to the point where it seems normal to make public statements about whether members of your own family are following each other on Instagram. It is unquestionable that everyone involved in this story has had their brains pickled by too much money and not enough working for it.
And with people as famous as the Beckhams, like with the royal family, it creates this uncomfortable tension for normal people watching this happen, feeling that we shouldn’t know this much about the intimate familial difficulties of people we don’t know, and yet feeling as if they are very invested in wanting us to know it at the same time as saying they wish we didn’t. Beckham ended his Stories with the line “All we want peace, privacy and happiness for us and our future family.” Massively enhanced privacy is in fact immediately available to all of these people. Stop posting on social media.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source slate.com ’
