Rebecca Loos is roadkill, Brand Beckham rolls on

The hairstyles tell the story. Watching David and Victoria Beckham’s hair over the three decades of their lives covered in the new Netflix documentary about him is like watching the seasons change in speeded-up stop-motion: here she is in the 1990s with her flat-iron centre parting and there he is with his dirty blond curtains; there she is in the 2000s with her Waggish peroxide blonde and him with an Alice band; and here they are today, her with casually loose but undoubtedly expensive brunette extensions, him a fledgling silver fox. Whereas so many of their Nineties contemporaries never left that decade, hair and style-wise — the Gallagher brothers, say — the Beckhams have always been astonishingly good at remaking themselves, which is why they have been able to maintain their extraordinary fame for such an extraordinarily long time: they don’t resist change; they seize it.

Except, perhaps, in one regard. In the documentary the couple finally acknowledge that, contrary to his denials in 2004, David had an affair with his PA, Rebecca Loos. Well, kinda. Her name is never spoken, and neither David nor Victoria confirms he did it; they just don’t say he didn’t. Victoria says, “It was the hardest period.” (a massive shock to anyone who expected her to say, “It was a right laugh — I loved reading in a tabloid what my husband did with another woman.”) David says, “I don’t know how we got through it ... But we’re fighters, and what we had is worth fighting for.”

Thus, this saga becomes co-opted into Brand Beckham, with the devoted couple overcoming villains like red cards, Glenn Hoddle and the “horrible stories”, to use David’s term for newspaper coverage of his affair and possible affairs. Their story swiftly moves on, and Loos is left in its wake, documentary roadkill.

As I said, Loos is not named, but anyone over the age of 35 will know exactly who is being referred to here. It is understandable that the Beckhams would rather not say her name, but for the documentary to treat her as the nameless bedbug in the marital home feels like something from the 2000s rather than today. After Monica Lewinsky, who has spoken about how traumatised she was by the press and public treating her like President Clinton’s silly slut in the 1990s, I thought we’d moved on from this sniffy attitude about the Other Woman luring in the helpless man. But some trends are harder to shake than hairstyles.

You might not think Loos cuts an especially sympathetic figure, given that she sold her story and then entered the meat-grinder world of men’s magazines and reality-TV shows. But that’s never been relevant — and was David so sympathetic, shagging his PA when he was “lonely”, as he says in describing the run-up to the affair? Loos had the misfortune to enter the news cycle at a nexus point for women, when the cheeky, cheerful kiss-and-tells of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were to make way for the much bleaker “Upskirt Decade”, to use Sarah Ditum’s term from her fascinating forthcoming book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties. “Upskirt” refers to the way paparazzi would lie on the pavement in the hope of getting a shot of a young woman’s underwear. You can surely guess which women: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears. Roadkill of the 2000s, one and all. It was an era in which young women were held up as grotesque spectacles, blamed and shamed for their sexuality and vulnerability.

Loos was the last big kiss-and-tell story: with the help of her publicist, Max Clifford, she negotiated an alleged £1 million from interviews and TV appearances. That kind of money no longer exists in media deals. But in a sign of what was to come in the Wild West internet era, Clifford also suggested — according to Loos — that she release a sex tape to make another million. She declined. Less than a decade later Clifford was found guilty of sexually assaulting girls and young women and died in prison — an early hint of a truth that would emerge during MeToo: it wasn’t young women’s sexuality that needed policing here.

Loos got the money, but she also got the kind of vilification that Hilton would receive when her much older former boyfriend Rick Salomon released their sex tape. Hilton was derided as a slut while Salomon walked away, repeating the dynamic of Loos and Beckham.

The Beckhams were hugely famous, wealthy and protected. Loos was a 26-year-old now unemployed PA, who had only Clifford, of all people, for support. Beckham was married; Loos was not. But no one cared. The public anger at her seemed to stem from a sense of betrayal: how dare she ruin the illusion of Brand Beckham! And, to judge from the documentary, that sentiment hasn’t changed.

Loos, Hilton and others made some bad choices, but no worse than the men around them. Yet they were the roadkill. Occasionally they capitalised on those choices, sometimes in a fruitless attempt to control the narrative: Loos has said she sold her story because the papers were going to break it anyway. And sometimes they needed the money. This then increased the public scorn, as if by speaking up they had forfeited any right to dignity.

You’d have thought the Beckhams — revealing their own private lives in this documentary for legacy management — might have some sympathy for that. But, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote 75 years ago, and as so many are still resistant to understanding, women are part victim, part accomplice, like everyone else. Even the Beckhams.