Moby is doubling down on his claim that he once dated Natalie Portman – even though she denies it.
On Tuesday, the electronica musician shared a lengthy Instagram message insisting that things indeed got romantic between him and the Oscar winner, the latest move in a recent back-and-forth between the two over their disputed history.
The argument started last month, when the UK’s The Sunday Times published an excerpt from Moby’s forthcoming memoir, “Then It Fell Apart.” In the selection, the “Disco Lies” artist recounted sparks flying when he met a young Natalie in his dressing room.
“This was confusing,” the excerpt read in part. “I was a bald binge drinker who lived in an apartment that smelled like mildew and old bricks and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.”
Moby claimed that he was 33 and Natalie was 20 when they met. Per his account, they began dating and he “tried to be her boyfriend,” but the “Star Wars” beauty eventually called things off after meeting someone new.
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On Tuesday, Natalie broke her silence on Moby’s claims and painted a much different picture of their past interactions.
“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 told Harper’s Bazaar. “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”
Natalie offered up her own account of their first encounter, which she claimed he established as explicitly friendly.
“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.”
The “Annihilation” actress then slammed Moby’s inclusion of his version of events in his memoir as a blatant attempt to drive sales.
“There was no fact checking from him or his publisher – it almost feels deliberate,” she said. “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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Hours after Harper’s Bazaar published Natalie’s comments, Moby took to Instagram to defend his take.
“I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated,” he began. “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,” he added.
This isn’t the first time Moby has made claims about dating Natalie. In a 2008 interview with Spin, he categorized their time together as a “very brief affair” and joked that it had made him “the target of a lot of nerd wrath.”
“You can’t date Luke Skywalker’s mom and not have them hate your guts,” he said.