Inside the world of Nicola Peltz: the ‘strong’ woman at the heart of the Beckham row

Consistently” disrespected. A wedding dress offered and then rescinded. Being described as “not blood” and “not family” on the eve of said wedding. And even getting snubbed by her mother-in-law after asking for support to “save displaced dogs”. According to the explosive statement shared on Instagram on Monday night by her husband Brooklyn, Nicola Peltz Beckham has allegedly had a pretty tumultuous time of it since plighting her troth to Britain’s other royal family.

In Brooklyn’s statement, which comes after months of media speculation over reportedly icy relations between David and Victoria Beckham and their eldest son, he claimed that his American actor wife has been “constantly disrespected by my family, no matter how hard we’ve tried to come together as one”. The couple’s 2022 wedding, he said, was a particular source of contention, after their first dance was allegedly scuppered in favour of a dance with his mum.

“The narrative that my wife controls me is completely backwards,” the 26-year-old wrote, nodding to the undercurrent of reports that have suggested that his relationship has dragged him away from his parents and three younger siblings. “I have been controlled by my parents for most of my life.”

The Beckhams are yet to respond directly to their son’s claims – though David said yesterday "you have to let your children make mistakes" while speaking to a US broadcaster about the power of social media. But the affair threatens to shatter the perfectly curated public image that Brooklyn scornfully refers to as “Brand Beckham” in his screed (which seemed to take a leaf out of Prince Harry’s scorched-earth playbook).

For observers on this side of the Atlantic, where the newly knighted Sir David and his family are almost as ubiquitous as the Windsors, 31-year-old heiress Nicola is a more unknown quantity. She’s gone from cropping up in smiling photos of various Beckham clan outings to being cast alternately as some sort of daughter-in-law from hell (by various media commentators) or as a righteous angel shielding Brooklyn from “a life shaped by image, press, or manipulation” (by her husband). So who is the woman at the heart of this row?

As the offspring of a footballing hero and a former Spice Girl, Brooklyn grew up in luxury. But his wife’s upbringing is enough to make the Beckham family fortunes look, well, relatively modest by comparison. Her father, Nelson Peltz, is a self-made billionaire who built up his family’s food distribution company into a multimillion-dollar business before founding a lucrative investment fund.

In the Nineties, he was known for riling up his neighbours in upstate New York with his fondness for commuting to Manhattan by helicopter; these days, he’s notorious as the man who played “matchmaker” between Donald Trump and Elon Musk (Peltz is a longtime Republican donor).

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Nicola and her seven siblings grew up in the Peltzes’ 22-room mansion in Bedford, Westchester County, situated in a 130-acre estate boasting its own ice hockey rink (the family are devotees of the sport; Nicola’s brother Bradley is a professional player, and Nicola once dreamed of the same career) and a collection of paintings by the likes of Renoir and Degas.

She began acting in her teens, appearing in films such as The Last Airbender and Transformers: Age of Extinction, as well as the horror drama Bates Motel. Her movie career brought her into a starry milieu: in 2016, she was briefly linked to Justin Bieber, and the following year, she started dating Anwar Hadid, the younger brother of models Gigi and Bella.

This year-and-a-half-long relationship has become the subject of retrospective scrutiny as Brooklyn and Nicola’s feud with the Beckhams has deepened. Many have (perhaps uncharitably) pointed out some of the parallels. The Hadids were another high-profile clan and darlings of the fashion industry; during the romance, her boyfriend’s family would post photos posing cheerfully with her on their Instagram accounts, and vice versa. Even the age gap between Nicola and Anwar (just over four years) is similar to that between her and her now-husband.

Although things started off strongly between Nicola and the Hadids (“he comes from such an amazing family,” she gushed in one interview), there has been some (unverified) fan speculation that Anwar became distant from his family during the romance. It’s worth noting that none of the Hadids have ever spoken publicly about this.

The Daily Mail has also reported that the Hadids were “bothered” by the age difference between the then-22-year-old actor and the 18-year-old aspiring model, and by Nicola’s “strong personality”. “They feared he was struggling, going out with a woman who was so much older than him at such a formative time in his life,” a source told the paper. So when Yolanda Hadid, Anwar’s mother and former star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, commented with a heart emoji on one of Victoria’s Instagram posts last summer, sharp-eyed followers immediately interpreted it as a potential sign of solidarity.

Nicola and Brooklyn first crossed paths at Coachella, the Californian festival notorious for drawing a crowd of monied, photogenic partygoers, in 2017, when she was still dating Anwar; her future husband was hanging out with her brothers. “It was brief, but I felt something,” Nicola later recalled. “I had a boyfriend, he had a girlfriend – but there was this instant charm.”

Romance sparked two and a half years later, when both of them, now single, were invited to a Halloween party hosted by Leonardo DiCaprio in 2019. “One of my friends was having trouble getting in, so I asked Brooklyn for help and he didn’t hesitate,” Nicola told Glamour. “Two days later, we had our first kiss. That’s when the story really began.” Their whirlwind love story played out in a never-ending stream of loved-up Instagram photos and back-and-forth transatlantic flights.

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Little more than six months into their relationship, Brooklyn got down on one knee at the Peltz family estate – but he’d known that he would ask Nicola to marry him after just three months. As he told Glamour, “I always knew I wanted to marry young – and when I met Nicola, I was just sure.”

“You’ve made me the luckiest girl in the world,” she later wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of the couple taken by her soon-to-be sister-in-law Harper. “I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life by your side. Your love is the most precious gift.”

Her decision to wear a yellow Victoria Beckham gown in this engagement snap seemed to suggest that she had well and truly been accepted into the Beckham family fold. Indeed, Victoria and David marked the occasion with gushing social media posts of their own. “The MOST exciting news!!” Victoria raved on Instagram. “We could not be happier that @brooklynbeckham and @nicolaannepeltz are getting married.” David, meanwhile, shared his “congratulations to these two beautiful people”.

Two years later, the pair tied the knot in a rumoured $4m ceremony at the Peltz family’s Miami residence, attended by the likes of Venus and Serena Williams, Eva Longoria and Gordon Ramsay (plus a handful of Spice Girls). By this point, though, it seemed like relations had cooled somewhat between Nicola and her in-laws, with speculation centring around her lavish wedding dress. In the lead-up to the nuptials, it had been reported that the actor would wear a custom design from Victoria’s brand, but when she eventually made it down the aisle, she was dressed in Valentino.

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Ever since, this bridal switch-up has been the source of plenty of media speculation. Back in 2022, Nicola appeared to brush off any suggestions of bad feeling, telling Grazia USA that she and Victoria had initially “connected to start designing the dress”, before her mother-in-law eventually decided that “her atelier couldn’t make it”, prompting the bride and her stylist to call upon Valentino.

But in his bombshell statement, Brooklyn told a more inflammatory tale. “My mum cancelled making Nicola’s dress [at] the 11th hour despite how excited she was to wear her design, forcing her to urgently find a new dress,” he alleged. It didn’t take long, however, for online commentators to start picking holes in his version of events.

One resurfaced Vogue interview with Nicola’s longtime stylist Leslie Fremar, published shortly after the wedding, described the bridal gown as “the culmination of a year’s worth of conversations with Valentino creative director Pier Paolo Piccioli’s team”, plus two trips to the brand’s Rome headquarters and two further fittings in the States. Fremar described it as “the ultimate couture experience”. None of this seemed to quite tally with an “11th hour” scramble to find a new gown.

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The newly minted Peltz Beckhams spent the next couple of years dutifully attending family events, but in 2025, they were notable by their absence at David’s 50th birthday bash, among various other trips and parties. And when the footballer finally received his knighthood at Windsor Castle in November, Brooklyn and Nicola weren’t present for the celebrations; neither commented on the accolade on social media, either. For a family that once seemed so close-knit – and was so happy to shout about it on Instagram, too – all signs pointed to a fracture.

Late last year, it appeared that Brooklyn had blocked his family on social media. “My mum and dad would never unfollow their son,” his 20-year-old brother Cruz wrote on Instagram. “Let's get the facts right. They woke up blocked … as did I.” Brooklyn, however, has now claimed that his brothers “were sent to attack me on social media, before they ultimately blocked me out of nowhere this last summer”.

With the release of his shocking statement, Brooklyn seems to have placed his allegiances firmly with his wife and her family. Nicola has been described as the apple of her billionaire father’s eye, and her parents reportedly “want to indulge her and ensure she never struggles”, a source told The Sun (there has been speculation over whether the Beckhams’ apparent desire to let their kids stand on their own two feet might have provoked something of a “culture clash” between the two families).

The same paper has reported that Nicola is the primary owner of the rumoured $16m property that she shares with Brooklyn. Could this disparity in finances prove problematic in the future? Without the backing of Brand Beckham, it’s unclear whether Brooklyn’s solo businesses (such as his hot sauce business and other forays into the food industry) or any other future ventures will make quite such a splash.

Right now, though, it seems like the young couple are very much closing ranks. Nicola has the words “family first” tattooed on her ribs in Yiddish (her father is Jewish) and it seems that she is taking that particular mantra to heart. Are we about to see her husband dropping his Beckham moniker and becoming a Peltz for the foreseeable future?