Moby & Natalie Portman
via Moby's Instagram

Moby insists he dated Natalie Portman; she remembers a "much older man being creepy"

Moby released his second memoir (following 2016’s Porcelain), Then It Fell Apart, earlier this month, and it’s been making headlines from the tales of encounters with the likes of Christina Ricci, Lana Del Rey (when she was still going by Lizzie Grant), and Natalie Portman contained in its pages. Natalie, however, responded to the claims in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, saying they aren’t true. From Harper’s:

In his new book, [Moby] alleges that Portman flirted with him in his dressing room when he was 33 and she was 20. He goes on to claim that the two started dating and that he “tried to be her boyfriend”, but eventually she broke it off after meeting someone else – news that came as some relief to him as it meant not having to tell her about his anxiety issues.

None of this is how Portman remembers it and she wants to put the record straight. First things first; she wasn’t 20 when they met, she was barely 18 having recently graduated from high school.

“I was surprised to hear that he characterised the very short time that I knew him as dating because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school,” Portman told us. “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. There was no fact checking from him or his publisher – it almost feels deliberate. That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me. It wasn’t the case. There are many factual errors and inventions. I would have liked him or his publisher to reach out to fact check.”

Her account puts Moby, now 53, is a less favourable light – and is unlikely to drive book sales in a way that an alleged fling with a young Natalie Portman might.

“I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated,” she said. “When we met after the show, he said, ‘let’s be friends’. He was on tour and I was working, shooting a film, so we only hung out a handful of times before I realised that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”

Moby doubled down on his story from the memoir in a post to his Instagram:

I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date. And after briefly dating in 1999 we remained friends for years. I like Natalie, and I respect her intelligence and activism. But, to be honest, I can’t figure out why she would actively misrepresent the truth about our(albeit brief)involvement. The story as laid out in my book Then It Fell Apart is accurate, with lots of corroborating photo evidence, etc.
Thanks,
Moby

Ps I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me(to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too), but it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxwubzJhaq2/

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