Natalie Portman has denied Moby’s claims that the pair dated - and labelled his behaviour as an ‘older man being creepy’. The electronic musician wrote in his recently released autobiography Then it Fell Apart that he went out with the Oscar winner for ‘a few weeks’ when she was 20 - but Natalie has said 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, ‘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. 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.’