Natalie Portman is disputing claims made by Moby that the two dated decades ago, prompting the musician to double down on his story.
In a new interview with Harpers Bazaar UK, the 37-year-old actress is asked about claims Moby made in his new memoir “Then It Fell Apart,” in which he claimed that they briefly dated in 1999 when he was 33 and she was 20.
“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, before correcting him on the facts.
“He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18,” the Oscar winner noted. ”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.”
Portman recounted how she met the musician, now 53, at one of his shows, saying that they saw each other several times before she realized that Moby had romantic feelings that she did not wish to reciprocate.
“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 realized that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”
In an Instagram rebuttal posted Wednesday, Moby stood by his story and shared a photo of him and Portman. He wrote that “Natalie’s possible regret in dating me... doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history.”
He seemingly acknowledged her Harper’s Bazaar interview, writing, ”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.”
He added, “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.”
Portman has been married to Benjamin Millepied, who choreographed her Oscar-winning ballet films “Black Swan,” since August 2012. They have two children: son Aleph, 8, and daughter Amalia, 2.
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