Hooker slur: ‘Say it to my face,’ asks Beckham

David Beckham is showing signs of stress as his legal team prepare a £20m lawsuit against a prostitute who claims she slept with him. The LA Galaxy striker went out of his way to angrily challenge a fan who taunted him after a match this weekend, telling him to repeat his comments “to my face”.

The whole incident was captured on video. A bare-chested Beckham at first ignores the fan, who shouts “Stop with the prostitutes!” But when the fan repeats his taunt, Beckham strides towards him, before repeatedly asking him if he wants to say it again.

“I didn’t say anything,” says the heckler. After expressing his disgust that the man is wearing an LA Galaxy shirt, and is supposedly therefore a fan, Beckham walks away.

The incident has attracted attention because Beckham is normally such a smooth, and dignified operator – he learned a valuable lesson in controlling his temper early in his career at the 1998 World Cup, when his lashing out at Argentina’s Diego Simeone was said by many to have put England out of the tournament.

But Beckham has obviously been cut to the quick by allegations he slept with Irma Nici, the Bosnian prostitute who is holed up in New York’s fashionable W hotel, hiding from agents working for Beckham who are trying to serve her a writ.

As a measure of his confidence her allegations are baseless, Beckham is suing not only Nici but her madam, the US magazine she spoke to and their German publisher. As well as his UK legal firm, who also happen to work for the Queen, Beckham has retained the celebrated US trial lawyer Bert Deixler.

The enormous suit could end with a payout of £20m, experts say.

Fresh details of Nici have also emerged. Real name Irma Nezirovic, she was born in Bosnia to a middle class Muslim family. She grew up in Sarajevo with a psychiatrist mother and a father who served as an officer in the army.

At the outbreak of war in 1992, when Nici was 9, the family were separated from the father and forced into an internment camp at an army base. According to an unnamed ‘friend’ of Nici who spoke to the Daily Mail, the young girl witnessed a rape soon after arriving in the camp.

They later fled the country as refugees, moving to Holland. There they were rejoined by Nici’s father, but the family was soon fragmented by divorce. By 12, Nici was living in children’s homes.

She came to London, where she had recently broken up with a wealthy boyfriend and started working as a prostitute. She was £700,000 in debt when she fled to the US. ·