Natalie Portman is pushing back against claims made by Moby that the two dated in the late '90s, when she was barely 18 years old.
In the musician's new memoir, Moby describes meeting Portman backstage at one of his shows in 1999. He (incorrectly) asserts that she was 20 years old at the time, when he was 33. He then goes on to claim that the two dated for a while, and he "tried to be her boyfriend." He says Portman ultimately broke it off.
But in a recent interview with Harper's Bazaar, Portman disputed his claims and expressed her disgust at the whole situation.
“I was surprised to hear that he characterized the very short time that I knew him as dating," she told the magazine. "Because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school."
She also pointed out a key mistake Moby made about her age — and hints that he possibly made that error on purpose:
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," she continued. "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.”
And Portman's memories of their interactions are very different from what Moby describes in his book:
I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated. 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.
This morning, Moby took to Instagram and posted this photo. He doubled down on his claims that he dated Portman, saying he "can’t figure out why she would actively misrepresent the truth."
He insisted that his version of events is accurate, although he did not address the (easily googlable!) fact that Natalie would have been 17 or 18 in 1999, not 20 as his book claims. He also did not address why he, a man in his mid-thirties at the time, was so keen on dating a teenager.
"I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me (to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too)," he wrote. "But it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history."
I think I speak for all of us when I say: Yuck.
You can read Portman's full interview with Harper's Bazaar here.
