Actress Natalie Portman has slammed a claim by musician Moby in his recently published memoir.
“There was no fact checking from him or his publisher,” Portman told Harper’s Bazaar. “It almost feels deliberate. That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me. It wasn’t the case."
In Then It Fell Apart, Moby described meeting a flirtatious Portman when he was 33 and she was 20. He claimed they started dating but she ended the relationship upon meeting someone else.
Not quite, Portman said. “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,” she explained.
“He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”
Portman said she was a fan of Moby and went to one of his shows. “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 took to Instagram to insist "we did, in fact, date."
Sharing a photo of the pair, he wrote: "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.
"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."
This article has been updated since it was first published, to add Moby's rebuttal.