Moby vs. Natalie Portman - it's the celebrity feud we never knew we wanted! (And the photos we desperately wish we could unsee.)
It all started earlier this week, when Moby claimed he dated Natalie in his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart. According to him, the pair met backstage after a concert in Austin, Texas when he was 33 and she was 20. "I was a bald binge drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star," he wrote. "But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me."
The musician went on to recount snuggling in bed with Natalie at her Harvard University dorm room. "We held hands and wandered around Harvard, kissing under the centuries-old oak trees," he wrote. "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."
According to the Porcelain singer, this alleged winter-summer relationship didn't last long due to his struggles with anxiety. "It wanted one thing: for me to be alone," Moby wrote. "Nothing triggered my panic attacks more than getting close to a woman I cared about." he alleges he "tried to be Natalie’s boyfriend for a few weeks but [it] hadn’t worked out." And just like that, Mobalie was no more!
However, Natalie vehemently disagreed with his recollection of their relationship. Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar UK, she angrily denied dating him, and called his behavior "creepy." (Ouch.) "I was surprised to hear that he characterized the very short time that I knew him as dating," she said, "because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school."
"He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t," she continued. " I was a teenager. I had just turned 18… 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," the Annihilation star concluded. "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."
On Instagram, Moby doubled on his claims by sharing a photo of himself shirtless with a young Natalie. (That would seem to back up her version of events, not his, but okay!) "I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated," he wrote in the caption. "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," he continued. "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. 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."
