UPDATE: 4 P.M., Saturday, May 25

Moby has apologized after Natalie Portman refuted his claims they dated when she was 20, which he had included in his new memoir. “As some time has passed I’ve realized that many of the criticisms leveled at me regarding my inclusion of Natalie in Then It Fell Apart are very valid,” Moby wrote on Instagram on Saturday (May 25). “I also fully recognize that it was truly inconsiderate of me to not let her know about her inclusion in the book beforehand, and equally inconsiderate for me to not fully respect her reaction.

“I have a lot of admiration for Natalie, for her intelligence, creativity, and animal rights activism, and I hate that I might have caused her and her family distress,” he continued, before adding, “I tried to treat everyone I included in Then It Fell Apart with dignity and respect, but nonetheless it was truly inconsiderate for me to not let them know before the book was released.
So for that I apologize, to Natalie, as well as the other people I wrote about in Then It Fell Apart without telling them beforehand.”

“Also I accept that given the dynamic of our almost 14 year age difference I absolutely should’ve acted more responsibly and respectfully when Natalie and I first met almost 20 years ago,” he concluded.

Original Story:

In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Natalie Portman refutes musician Moby’s claims that they dated when she was 20 years old. Instead, she says, it was a case of him acting “creepy” toward her when she was a teenager and he was 33.

Moby, now 53, claims in his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, that he and Portman met backstage after one of his shows in Austin, Texas. “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 writes, according to The Telegraph.

In the memoir, per The Guardian, Moby recalls going to parties in New York with the actress and visiting her when she was a student at Harvard. “At midnight she brought me to her dorm room and we lay down next to each other on her small bed. After she fell asleep I carefully extracted myself from her arms and took a taxi back to my hotel.”

But Portman, 37, has a different memory of the events. “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 tells British Harper’s Bazaar. “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 continued, “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 realized that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”

Moby took to Instagram on Wednesday, May 22, to address Portman’s comments.

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