What David And Victoria Beckham's Ex Bodyguard Said About Them
David Beckham and Victoria Beckham's marriage has always commanded attention. At the height of their popularity in the late '90s and early 2000s, the former soccer star and Spice Girl were often scooped up for sultry photospreads, and could barely step out of their homes without being hounded by fans, paparazzi, and other menacing forces. Given the circumstances, it's not shocking that they started employing bodyguards to protect themselves and, eventually, their large brood of children. The need for personal security became painfully obvious when British officials and reporters exposed an elaborate plot to kidnap Victoria and two of their sons for ransom in 2002.
This wasn't the first time they had to grapple with the possibility of kidnapping. Victoria and David detailed a different possible kidnapping scenario centering on their oldest son, Brooklyn Beckham. "We were getting kidnapping threats right from when we had Brooklyn," Victoria said during their Netflix documentary, "Beckham," as noted by Glamour. "Imagine having a baby and having death threats. David had to play knowing this was all going on. And I was on my own in an apartment with a baby." David and Victoria even hired their son, Brooklyn a personal security guard in 2002, a move that angered some parents at the todder's private school.
Victoria and David continued to employ security in their lives. Unfortunately for the couple, some of those bodyguards have spilled some of their secrets.
Victoria Beckhan was running the show
One of Victoria and David Beckham's former bodyguards, Craig Ainsworth, who served the couple between 2013 and 2015, revealed to The Mirror that Victoria, not David, was running their relationship behind the scenes. "Who's in charge? I feel most women are in charge and just let us men feel like we're in charge half the time," said Ainsworth, a former Marine, in 2023. Ainsworth also revealed that the Beckhams had a ton of security on hand. "David and Victoria are both highly professional and have had so much security we're like background noise to them, we're part of the furniture," he added.
Given the wealth of secrets Ainsworth probably held, this was a pretty tame recollection. Unfortunately, he's not the only ex-bodyguard with chatty tendencies. In 2000, the Beckhams sued another of their former bodyguards, Mark Niblett, for feeding information about their private life to Andrew Morton, the famous biographer who penned Princess Diana's biography nearly a decade earlier, and who was in the process of writing a new tome about the couple. In August of that year, the Beckhams were forced to settle their case against Morton due to laws involving free speech. Morton's Beckham-centered biography, "Posh and Becks," was released in 2001.
Eh, you can't win them all!
The couple used to take detours
Much to the detriment of money-motivated paparazzi, Victoria and David Beckham sometimes used detours during their public outings. In 2003, Andy Bernal, an ex-player for the Socceroos, an Australian football team, traded in his cleats and began acting as David's "agent, manager and bodyguard" while he lived in Madrid, per an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. Bernal detailed the time he and Victoria Beckham's sister, Louise Adams, posed as the couple — all in an attempt to trick the relentless paparazzi to prevent them from foiling the couple's birthday party for their son, Romeo Beckham.
Bernal donned a blonde wig to ring truer to David's likeness, while Adams simply relied on her striking familial resemblance to Victoria. Unfortunately, the scheme backfired on Bernal and Louise, who ended up in a car accident fueled by the eager photogs. "The paparazzi are ruthless," Bernal revealed. "I believed most days there was a good chance I was going to die in a car crash with David Beckham. When you're there it is exciting but you sit back at home and think 'I was a couple of inches from dying in a car crash.'"
During the same interview, Bernal revealed that he'd also turned down large paydays from people looking for him to trash the Beckhams in the media. Unfortunately, not all of the couple's former security held that same honor. In 2004, it was reported that nearly a dozen former bodyguards for the Beckhams were attempting to sell their secrets for 500,000 British pounds. Yikes!