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Moby claims he dated Natalie Portman in 1999. She's completely denied it ever happened.

 

 

Earlier this month, techno musician Moby released a memoir, Then It Feel Apart. 

You would think the most shocking headline to come out of this book would be the now 53-year-old admitting he once “rubbed his penis” on a pre-presidency Donald Trump at a party in 2001 (for real), but that is not the case.

You see, Moby said he dated Natalie Portman. Natalie Portman said he didn’t. Moby said he did, again, this time on Instagram. And now we’re here.

In his book, the musician wrote that Portman flirted with him in his dressing room after a show in Austin, Texas. It was 1999 – he was 33 and she, he said, was 20. He goes on to recall a number of dates they went on and said he “tried to be her boyfriend”, but that she eventually broke it off after meeting someone else.

Portman, 37, recalled their ‘relationship’ differently. Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar UK, she said her recollection of Moby is of an older man acting “creepy” with her.

She was surprised that he’d characterised the “very short time” they’d known each other as dating. After meeting at the Austin show, Portman recalled that she and Moby “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”.

“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,” she said.

In response, Moby shared a photo of the pair to his Instagram account. In it, the musician is shirtless, smiling and has his arm wrapped around Portman, who is faintly smiling.

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He doubled down on his claim.

 

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“I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date,” he captioned the photo.

“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.”

He pointed to ‘photo evidence’ in his memoir as proof of his account. He did not address the factual error of Portman’s age at the time.

Portman wasn’t the only woman Moby name-dropped in his memoir. He also wrote that he dated actress Christina Ricci and an up-and-coming singer named Lizzie Grant, who would later be known as Lana Del Rey.