By her own admission, Emma Basden is best known as ‘Rebecca Loos’ former lesbian lover’, and gained a high degree of publicity when she was revealed as the woman seeing Loos at the same time Loos was allegedly seeing David Beckham.
Emma and Rebecca met each other five years ago and, she confesses, were attracted to each other’s personalities from the start. After building a close friendship, they became romantically involved, but their relationship was more ‘fling’ than ‘full on’, ‘It was never “Rebecca and I”,’ says Emma. When the News of the World contacted Loos to say they were going to break the story about her alleged affair with Beckham, with or without Rebecca’s version of events, Emma advised her to contact Public Relations guru Max Clifford, and arranged for Loos to give her first TV interview with Kay Burley on Sky.
Emma’s intervention was clearly borne of concern for a friend to whom she remains unflinchingly loyal, arguing that Rebecca isn’t the marriage-wrecking type. ‘If you’re with somebody on a daily basis, and their wife isn’t there, and they’re saying they’re slightly unhappy and lonely, things can just happen. You can forget that that person is a soccer idol and that they’re married with children. We’ve all done it – perhaps not with a soccer idol, but we’ve all been there at one stage or another.
‘Rebecca’s a bit of a wild card and does put her foot in it, but she knows that and that’s the beauty of her. She’s one of the most grounded, loving, funny people I know.’
After the Loos–Beckham story broke, the Daily Mirror ran an interview with Basden, in which she was quoted as saying, ‘There were three of us in this relationship’, and which she now denies. ‘I learnt a big lesson from that interview. It hurt me and it affected me.’ For the first time during our interview she appears vulnerable. ‘My friends told me they knew I’d never say stuff like that, but the rest of the world didn’t.’