Moby writes in his new book that they had a brief relationship in 1999, but Portman says it's not true.
Moby is defending his claim that he and Natalie Portman dated, despite the actress' statement otherwise.
In an Instagram post on Wednesday, the 53-year-old musician doubled down on his assertion that he and Portman had a romantic relationship in 1999. He wrote about the pair's time together in his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, explaining that they dated 20 years ago, when he was 33 and she was 20. In an interview with Harper's Bazaar UK published on Tuesday, Portman, who was 18, not 20, at the time, insisted they didn't date and called Moby "creepy."
"I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we'd never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date. And after briefly dating in 1999 we remained friends for years," Moby wrote on Instagram alongside a throwback photo of the two. "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," he added.
In his book, Moby claims that Portman flirted with him in his dressing room in 1999, and afterward, he said they met up at the MTV Video Music Awards and then at a Donatella Versace party together where he performed. In a later chapter of his book, Moby alleges having an "amazing night" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her, while she was attending Harvard.
"We held hands and wandered around Harvard, kissing under the centuries-old oak trees. 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," he claims, later writing that "for a few weeks I had tried to be Natalie's boyfriend, but it hadn't worked out... I was relieved that I'd never have to tell her how damaged I was."
During her interview with Harper's Bazaar, Portman tried to set the record straight.
"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 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."
"I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated," she recalled. "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."
Portman, who has been extremely private about her personal life throughout the years, married dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied in 2012, after meeting in 2009 on the set of Black Swan. They share two children, son Aleph and daughter Amalia.
See more on Portman in the video below.
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