Natalie Portman refutes “creepy” Moby’s claims that they dated
Moby writes about an alleged relationship with the actress in his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart.
Natalie Portman/ Moby
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Moby is currently promoting his second memoir, Then It Fell Apart, which includes a segment in which he talks about dating Natalie Portman when she was 20 and he was 33.
In the book Moby recalls first meeting Portman after a live show. “I was a bald binge drinker who lived in an apartment that smelled like mildew and old bricks, and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star," he writes. "But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.”
Later in the book he tells the story of visiting her while she studied at Harvard in Boston: “I took a taxi to Cambridge to meet Natalie. We held hands and wandered around Harvard, kissing under the centuries-old oak trees. At midnight 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.”
However, Natalie Portman has questioned Moby's recollection of events. Asked for her version of events by Harper's Bazaar, she distanced herself from any suggestion of romance and leveled criticism at both Moby and the book's publisher, Faber & Faber.
“I was surprised to hear that he characterized 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 said. “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.”
“I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated,” she continued. “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 realized that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”
Moby has responded to her quotes, writing on Instagram that he is "confused" at what she said and "can’t figure out why she would actively misrepresent the truth about our(albeit brief)involvement." He went on to add that he understands her "possible regret in dating me, but it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history."
Portman has yet to respond to Moby's latest comments.