Natalie Portman has denied claims made by Moby that she dated the “creepy” musician in the 1990s.
In his second and latest autobiography, Then it Fell Apart (2019), Moby, 53, wrote that he started dating the actress after meeting backstage at one of his concerts in Austin, Texas.
The Porcelain singer insisted Portman was 20 years old at the time, when she was actually only 18. Moby was 33 years old.
In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar on Tuesday, Portman, now 37, hoped to set the record straight. She recounted Moby as “a much older man being creepy” after she had just graduated high school.
Quick to respond, Moby took to Instagram in an attempt to convince his fans that Portman “actively misrepresented the truth about their… romantic history.”
“I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated,” wrote the songwriter. He shared a picture of the two arm-in-arm, in which he was shirtless. “This confused me, as we did, in fact, date,” he claimed.
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In his book, Moby wrote that the two would go to parties together in New York City when they weren’t in her Harvard University residency. “We’d be kissing under the centuries-old oak trees,” he claimed.
“At midnight,” he added, “she brought me to her dorm room and we lay down next to each other on her small bed. After she fell asleep, I carefully extracted myself from her arms and took a taxi back to my hotel.”
While Portman admitted she was once a fan of Moby, she claimed that she recounted none of the events detailed in Then it Fell Apart.
“I was surprised to hear that he characterised the very short time that I knew him as dating,” she said. “He said I was 20, I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”
She added that she would have liked it if Moby or his publisher reached out to fact-check his claims.
Moby later contradicted himself in the memoir by writing that he had “tried to be Natalie’s boyfriend” for a few weeks, “but it hadn’t worked out.”
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“When we met after the show, he said, ‘Let’s be friends,’” revealed the actress. “He was on tour and I was working, shooting a film, so we only hung out a handful of times before I realized that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate,” she concluded.
Moby claimed that after “briefly dating in 1999,” the two remained friends. “The story, as laid out in my book Then it Fell Apart, is accurate,” he further claimed, “with lots of corroborating photo evidence, etc.”
“I like Natalie, continued Moby in the recent Instagram post, “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.”
“I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me (to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too),” he added, “but it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history.”
Unfortunately, Portman wasn’t the only one subject to Moby’s “creepy” intentions.
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The musician wrote about a number of sexual encounters and relationships in not only this book but also in his 2016 memoir, Porcelain.
He included the time he supposedly “tried dating” pop sensation Lana Del Rey, who at the time, went by her given name, Lizzy Grant — or “Lizzie” Grant, according to Moby and his editor.
“She had short, bleached hair,” he wrote, “and looked like a beautiful elf… I sat next to her on the piano bench and started kissing her. She kissed me back,” he claimed, “but then stopped. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.”
“‘I like you,’ she said, ‘But I hear you do this with a lot of people.’ I wanted to lie,” he added, “to tell her that I didn’t, that I was chaste, sane, and ethical. But I said nothing.”
For the most part, Moby has received a lot of criticism online on his actions, writings and response to Portman’s recent interview.
As of this writing, Portman has not commented on Moby’s response.