Natalie Portman blasts “creepy” Moby for mischaracterizing their relationship

The log line for Moby’s new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, describes it as “a classic about the banality of fame. It is shocking, riotously entertaining, extreme, and unforgiving.”

It’s also rooted in fallacies.

So says Natalie Portman, whose past relationship with Moby is described in detail. “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,” Portman said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar (via Stereogum). “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.”

In Then It Fell Apart, Moby recounts several romantic flings with Portman, who is 16 years her junior. As Moby tells it, their first encounter was backstage at a concert in Austin in 1999. Moby says they soon began dating and attended the MTV VMAs as a couple. Later, Moby traveled to Cambridge, MA to visit Portman while 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,” Moby writes. “After she fell asleep I carefully extracted myself from her arms and took a taxi back to my hotel.”

Portman remembers it differently, however. “I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “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.”

Elsewhere in his memoir, Moby shares intimate details of a short fling he had with a Lana Del Rey, who at the time was 21 years old and still going by her birth name, Lizzy Grant. Somewhat hilariously, Moby repeatedly misspells Grant’s name (as Lizzie), further proving Portman’s point about the book’s factual inaccuracies.