Moby has written a new memoir in which he claims he dated Natalie Portman in 1999 when he was 33 and she was 18. This is the sort of thing one might deny because Moby is terrible, and that’s exactly what Natalie Portman did in an interview in 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,” Portman told us. “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.”
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“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 realised that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”
Ouch. Like, seriously, ouch. I mean, I wouldn’t want to admit to dating Moby either, but he insists it happened.
Why in the world would Moby ever show anyone that picture? She looks like he’s holding a knife on her kitten and he looks like he doesn’t actually know how to smile.
I lean towards believing Portman here because I’m pretty sure they didn’t have sex so that’s not much of a relationship. But I think we’ve all dated someone briefly and then wanted to say “Well, that didn’t count, did it?”