The ugly side of the Brooklyn Peltz Beckham backlash

This week, my social media feeds (minus Bluesky) were writhing and seizing with fresh celebrity gossip. There was the family estrangement between Brooklyn Peltz Beckham and his parents, and separately, the now-public text messages between Blake Lively and Taylor Swift that were released as part of Lively’s sexual harassment and retaliation case against her former co-star and director Justin Baldoni.

Caring about celebrity gossip under the reign of authoritarian violence feels trivial on the surface. But the multi-billion dollar industry behind the former actually shares a lot with the latter, including some of the same resources and people, even as it maintains a facade of being a meaningless distraction. “Drama” about the rich and famous often revolves around the most serious of topics, like gender-based violence and propaganda. The people occupying the most airtime in the gossip industry often have a simultaneous political agenda—and the way people choose sides in pop culture has political consequences. Just look at how the rejection of the #MeToo movement aligned with Donald Trump’s return to power in the U.S. Being able to identify who is abusing their power is just as important of a political literacy skill as it is in parsing tabloids.

The Beckham scandal is between David and Victoria, the UK power couple of soccer and Spice Girls fame, and their oldest son Brooklyn, who married billionaire heiress Nicola Peltz in April 2022. There’s been relentless gossip about the Beckham-Peltz dynamic ever since, with rampant speculation that Nicola was isolating Brooklyn and turning him against his family (an all-too-familiar narrative against women to deny their husbands’ agency). Then on Monday, Brooklyn posted a lengthy statement on his Instagram Story, accusing his parents of trying to control him his whole life and retaliating against him for marrying Nicola, including pushing negative stories about them in the press. A detail he alleged about Victoria dancing inappropriately with him at their wedding has gone the most viral, inspiring all kinds of memes and skits.

Shortly after Brooklyn posted these allegations, he received a wave of support online, especially from people who related to going “no contact” with their own parents. But it didn’t take long for the backlash to follow. The tone of many detractors is that Brooklyn shouldn’t have dared to speak negatively about his parents, which is a common reflex against victims of any sort for upsetting the status quo. If we assume Brooklyn is telling the truth, and we’ll dig into that a little bit more in a minute, then he’s defending himself and his wife from his parents’ false attacks, which were lobbed at them covertly, but publicly, through the media. It immediately struck me as similar to the dynamic between the British royal family, Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle (minus, of course, the anti-Black racism at the heart of Markle’s treatment). Prominent Meghan and Harry hate accounts have even jumped on the Beckham bandwagon, calling Brooklyn a liar and a “spoiled ungrateful brat.” Meanwhile, Nicola has been smeared with attacks on her appearance and viral lies about her pushing a nanny down the stairs and killing her, which is rooted in absolutely nothing. No nanny working for the Peltz family ever died like this or was involved in this kind of accident. It’s a total fabrication and a hallmark of a smear campaign.

There’s plenty to criticize on both sides of this family feud. Nelson Peltz, Nicola’s beloved father, is an ultra-conservative billionaire who introduced Donald Trump and Elon Musk and tried to launch a hostile takeover of Disney. Nicola seems to agree or at least be comfortable with her family’s conservatism, but that doesn’t actually have any bearing on her being the target of sexist smears. It just goes to show that no amount of privilege and proximity to power can fully shield her from the misogynistic tropes that define our narratives about women in the public eye. And perhaps people feel the need to make things up about Nicola to deflect from the fact that she has nothing to do with David and Victoria Beckham’s long history of using traditional and social media to craft their image and Brooklyn’s.

A lot of commenters have tried to pick apart Brooklyn’s statement to catch him out in a lie—another all-too-common response to someone coming forward to say they’ve been harmed. One impulse is to deny it, undermine their character, and try to prove them wrong (DARVO), rather than actually address the harms. When Brooklyn said Victoria backed out of making Nicola’s wedding dress, detractors pointed out that she had another dress planned far in advance—which means little, considering that many modern brides who can afford it will wear multiple dresses. Other people have thirsted for video evidence of Victoria dancing with Brooklyn, which would surely be interpreted in both directions if it leaked, confirming the viewer’s prior suspicions about the truth either way. And Brooklyn has been mocked for asking for privacy while making a public statement, which goes to show how insidious PR attacks can be. Even if his parents instigated the conflict, they did so in a way that can’t easily be proven. But we know Brooklyn is telling the truth about how his parents value and solicit good publicity. Their recent documentaries and entire adult lives prove that. And it’s worth noting that, as a mother, Victoria bears the brunt of the anger coming from people who believe Brooklyn, too. On both sides, the women’s appearances and behavior has been scrutinized the most, versus the men.

And no, Brooklyn is not as talented or successful as his parents, but that doesn’t mean they—or we—can bully him. The attacks on Brooklyn, and Nicola by extension, for daring to speak up about familial mistreatment have been shocking in their viciousness and cruelty. A lot of people clearly feel threatened just by the idea of a child speaking up against their parents, which itself stems from conservative ideals about power dynamics in the traditional family. That’s why people are telling Brooklyn to “be a man.” Then there are those who idolize Posh Spice and refuse to believe she’s done anything wrong—something I’d call being stan-brained. Pop star fans and Trump supporters can embody the same kind of parasocial hero worship.

Another thing that strikes me about the Beckham dynamics is how ordinary they are, despite happening on an extraordinary scale. If you ever browse subreddits like r/weddingshaming, a different version of this plays out with everyday people, well, every day. And if anonymous posters were describing the same wedding drama, the online crowd would overwhelmingly side with the children, declaring the parents narcissists and advising no contact going forward. But the more we think we know about the people involved, the less sympathetic we become. And this tends to mirror how everyday people are treated by their loved ones and communities when they come forward about being harmed, too. They get told to suck it up and get over it, because rocking the boat is too often viewed as more problematic than addressing the root of the conflict.

The Lively and Baldoni case, which I’ve covered at length, is another perfect example of this. A majority of women and a significant number of men have reported experiencing workplace sexual harassment, but the vast majority of abuses go unreported. What’s happening to Lively on a massive scale is exactly why. The latest movement in her case against Baldoni is that troves of text messages and depositions, including texts between Lively and Swift, have been released to the public—which has zeroed in on Swift’s involvement in particular. Baldoni’s counter-narrative, that Lively “took over” his movie (which was an adaptation of a woman’s book, a woman who has sided with Lively) was already dismissed in court. But people online are still trying to prove Baldoni’s version of events, even though the question is whether Lively’s allegations are true. It doesn’t really matter whether Lively tried to take control, and even if she did, maybe that was for the best. Several people on set have now testified that Baldoni behaved inappropriately, particularly regarding the movie’s sex scenes. Perhaps Lively’s issue was not being overly ambitious, a charge rarely leveled against men, but that she was trying to protect herself and others and deliver the best result possible. It Ends With Us did, in fact, perform very well at the box office.

But instead of paying attention to what this case is actually about, many people have instead taken it as an opportunity to continue humiliating Lively with intimate details from her personal communications. This is exactly what victims fear in coming forward and going through the legal system, if they even get the opportunity to do so. The public’s response becomes a participatory exercise in victim-blaming and shaming, led today by gossip influencers who dominate the conversation around the case. There’s a whole ecosystem of subreddits, stan Twitter, TikTok, and tea channels just waiting for you to unpack the latest court documents and Instagram stories. And some of those influencers are explicitly right-wing cultural commentators who use the cultural relevancy of the Lively case and the Beckham family drama to hook listeners and direct them down a pipeline of conservative political views.

The reality of what the Lively-Swift text messages show is that Lively’s personal life was deeply and negatively impacted by what she alleges was a campaign of sexual harassment and retaliation at work. And many people online are using that to smear her and Swift as bullies, because they cannot bring themselves to believe the much likelier and more common reality of how men abuse their power in professional settings. The messages actually help Lively’s case, but so far, the public response has been a redux of Depp v. Heard. And in addition to reorienting social media algorithms around conservative influencers, it’s obvious how these ideological leanings would push people in a more patriarchal direction, too.

Thanks for reading this far, and if you appreciate this kind of cultural commentary, consider upgrading your subscription to support my independent work and get access to my paywalled stories!