Natalie Portman Shoots Down Rumors She Had Teen Relationship With ‘Creepy’ Singer Moby

Singer Moby recently released new memoir in which he appeared to allege that he had a romantic relationship with Natalie Portman many years ago, but the actress has refuted the claims in an interview.

In his memoir, Then It Fell Apart, Moby wrote that the two met after Portman came to his dressing room after a show.

“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,” he wrote in an excerpt. He added that the pair attended the VMAs together, but Portman soon broke things off before he could.

“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,” the excerpt read. “I was relieved that I’d never have to tell her how damaged I was.”

Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar, Portman denied any romantic relationship between the pair and added that she was 18 at the time, not 20, as Moby wrote.

“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,” she said. “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.”

Portman further recalled that after meeting Moby, she felt his attention was “inappropriate.”

“I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated,” she said. “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 responded to Portman’s interview in an Instagram post on Wednesday morning.

“I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated,” he wrote alongside a photo of the two together. “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.”

“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.”

Photo Credit: Getty / Axelle/Bauer-Griffin