These are the manipulative, secret tactics used by ‘other women’ like Rebecca Loos and Lauryn Goodman: JANA HOCKING

There are two routes to fame. The first is the long, exhausting slog – involving talent, training, rejection, the odd humiliating gig in a damp church hall. The second is sleeping with someone famous.

One is years of graft. The other is waking up one morning with your name in every paper, your DMs full of interview requests.

It’s a funny thing, this ‘famous mistress’ business. For the family, the scandal is the worst chapter of their lives. For the mistress, it’s a career move.

And the thing about this shortcut to fame is that once someone’s experienced it, they’ll do almost anything to keep it.

Case in point, Rebecca Loos. Two decades after her alleged affair with David Beckham while working as his assistant, she’s still talking about it – this time in the promo cycle for her stint on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins. Only she calls it ‘telling her truth’ and ‘being brave’.

She may claim that she doesn’t want to talk about Beckham, protesting on Good Morning Britain this week that it’s ‘disappointing there was so much focus on [David]’ on SAS and in subsequent interviews. But let’s be honest: it’s a strategic revival of the only story that ever made her famous (and probably a quick buck).

And the odds are heavily stacked in her favour; every Beckham denial over the years has only been jet fuel for her public profile. Back when the claims emerged in 2004, Beckham complained of ‘ludicrous’ stories about his private life, adding: ‘The simple truth is that I am very happily married and have a wonderful wife and two very special kids. There is nothing any third party can do to change this.’

Rebecca Loos protested on Good Morning Britain this week that it’s ‘disappointing there was so much focus on [David Beckham]’ on SAS Who Dares Wins and in subsequent interviews

Lauryn Goodman has had two children with England and Man City footballer Kyle Walker

I learnt about the wreckage an affair can cause very young, when my own family was rocked by infidelity. So imagine that level of devastation taking place not behind closed doors, but splashed across the internet. Imagine strangers dissecting your marriage in the pub. Your kids being asked about it at school. Imagine finally getting to a place where the whispers have stopped… only for her to reappear on television, smiling sweetly as she reopens the wound for the sake of her latest gig.

That’s why Loos’s media rounds feel so off to me. She’s not moving on. She’s still mining it.

And she’s not alone. There’s a whole roster of women who’ve turned the ‘other woman’ role into a long-term career plan.

Lauryn Goodman is one of them. She had a baby with footballer Kyle Walker – then a second, after he’d married – and has been in and out of the headlines ever since. Sometimes it’s a cryptic Instagram post, sometimes a podcast appearance, but the goal is the same: keep the story simmering, never let it die.

The formula isn’t complicated. Step one: frame yourself as the victim. Not a victim – the victim. The one who ‘only speaks out’ when pushed, who’s just trying to ‘move on’.

Step two: accept every TV booking, podcast invite and magazine spread that comes your way.

Step three: let the wives do some of the work for you. Every time the wronged woman issues a denial or hits back, it pumps fresh oxygen into the story.

And let’s be honest, the wives are trapped. If they say nothing, it looks like guilt. If they speak, it’s a headline. Either way, the self-proclaimed mistress wins – while the wife continues with the slow, private work of patching up a life someone else blew apart for sport.

Which is why watching a mistress pop back up in the headlines – not to apologise or disappear quietly, but to cash in again – feels particularly galling. Because for most families, infidelity is a wound you try to stitch closed and hide. For the women in this particular fame ecosystem, it’s the goose that lays the golden egg.

The dopamine hit they get from it is the same brain chemical rush you get from applause or likes on Instagram. And once you’ve had that rush, you’ll look for ways to feel it again. For women like Loos and Lauryn Goodman, the easiest route back is to keep ‘reluctantly’ revisiting the very story you claim you want to bury.

It’s a genius PR move, if you’re willing to sell your soul to the devil. Psychologists call it Narcissistic Victim Syndrome. It’s not confession or self-reflection, it’s brand management.

Rebecca Loos may have been training with the SAS in the wilderness, but her real endurance feat has been turning 15 minutes of infamy into two decades of paydays.