UNITED KINGDOM (CelebrityAccess) Moby has canceled his book tour dates in the U.K. and Ireland with a recent controversy regarding actress Natalie Portman.
Moby was expected to be promoting his new memoir, “The It Fell Apart,” but yesterday wrote on Instagram and on his website that he was “going to go away for awhile (sic)” and is “canceling all upcoming public appearances for the foreseeable future.”
Although it was not directly explained, there appears to be a correlation to a recent fallout with Portman, whom he portrayed as a girlfriend in the book and apologized after she said their relationship was mischaracterized and noted that she was 18 at the time while he was in his 30s.
He apologized again on Instagram yesterday, implying that the tour dates were canceled to lower the heat.
“Before I [go away] I want to apologize again, and to say clearly that all of this has been my own fault,” he wrote. “I am the one who released the book without showing it to the people I wrote about. I’m the one who posted defensively and arrogantly. I’m the one who behaved inconsiderately and disrespectfully, both in 2019 and in 1999. There is obviously no one else to blame but me. Thank you, and I’m sorry.”
In the memoir, Moby said that Portman asked to meet up with him after a show.
“I was a bald binge drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star,” he wrote. “But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.”
“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 responded via an interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”
She added, “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 responded: “As some time has passed I’ve realized that many of the criticisms leveled at me regarding my inclusion of Natalie in Then It Fell Apart are very valid. I also fully recognize that it was truly inconsiderate of me to not let her know about her inclusion in the book beforehand, and equally inconsiderate for me to not fully respect her reaction. I have a lot of admiration for Natalie, for her intelligence, creativity, and animal rights activism, and I hate that I might have caused her and her family distress.”
