After Natalie Portman denied Moby’s claims that they dated, it looks like the musician is still keen to insist that he did go out with the Oscar winning actress. Even though, at the time, he was 33 and she was 18.
Posting a photo of the pair, which sees Moby with his shirt off, he wrote on Instagram, ‘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.’
He then added, ‘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.’
Let us remind you: their 'romantic history' happened when he was 33, and she was 18. (Even though, in the book, he claimed she was 20.) Given this age gap - Natalie was a teenager while he was a grown man, which makes it that bit weirder that he is jumping to defend his pride after Natalie brushed off the claims.
Natalie hit back yesterday, saying she found it ‘disturbing’ that the now 53-year-old used the ‘story to sell his book’, adding that they ‘only hung out a handful of times’ before she realised he was ‘interested in a way that felt inappropriate.’
The actress, 37, told Harper’s Bazaar, ‘I was surprised to hear that he characterised 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.’
‘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,’ she said. ‘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 realised that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.’
Moby, real name is Richard Melville Hall, wrote in his book Then it Fell Apart that he went out with the Oscar winner for ‘a few weeks’. He said, ‘I was a bald binge drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me. I was 33 and she was 20 but this was her world.’
‘For a few weeks I had tried to be Natalie’s boyfriend, but it hadn’t worked out,' he added. 'I thought that I was going to have to tell her that my panic was too egregious for me to be in a real relationship, but one night on the phone she informed me that she’d met somebody else. I was relieved that I’d never have to tell her how damaged I was.’
In the book, as NME reports, he also claims to have had a brief romance with pre-fame Lana Del Rey, describing her as ‘beautiful, smart, and charming.'