Natalie Portman Says Moby Misrepresented Their Relationship In His Autobiography

LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) — Recording artist and producer Moby was lauded for his candor in his new 2019 memoir “Then It Fell Apart,” but some of the claims he made in the tome might not hold up to scrutiny.

The now 53-year-old musician claimed in the book that he met actor Natalie Portman in 2003 and began dating her. The way Moby tells it, Portman came backstage after one of his performances in Austin in 1999 and began flirting with him. Moby says the two began dating and that he “tried to be her boyfriend,” but they ended their relationship when she met someone else.

“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,” Moby wrote in an excerpt of the autobiography that was published by Entertainment Weekly earlier this year. “But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.”

Portman has a different take on the experience and in an interview with Harpers Bazaar published on Thursday, she says: “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.”

“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,” she added.

The fact-checking complaint at least appears to be true. Portman was born on June 9th, 1981, which would make her 18 or 19, depending on when she met Moby in 1999.

Portman went on to note that they “hung out” a few times before she realized his interest in her was not platonic.

“I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated,” she told Harpers Bazaar. “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.”

After the publication of the Harpers Bazaar article, Moby responded to Portman’s claims in a social media post.

 

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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

A post shared by moby xⓋx (@moby) on May 22, 2019 at 3:23am PDT