Music artist Moby sort of walked into his own #MeToo moment by insinuating in his memoir, “Then It Fell Apart,” that he dated actress Natalie Portman when she was just 18 — though he believed that she was 20, while he was 33 at the time.
According to Harper’s Bazaar, Moby claimed in his memoir that he dated Natalie Portman for a while and even “tried to be her boyfriend” until she eventually broke it off by meeting someone else. Portman, however, sees it differently, being that she was just 18 and barely out of high school.
“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 told Bazaar. “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”
Portman went on to express outrage over the fact that neither Moby nor his publisher checked the facts of her age — insinuating it may have been a deliberate attempt to sell more books.
“There was no fact checking from him or his publisher — it almost feels deliberate,” Portman continued. “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 Portman’s version of her “relationship” with the then-33-year-old musician, they only “hung out a handful of times” until she realized that a much older man was interested in her.
“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.”
Later in the interview, Natalie Portman plugged the Time’s Up movement for circumventing “the legal system” which she claims has failed women. With movements like Time’s Up, according to Portman, women will have their voices heard.
“Time’s Up circumvented the legal system which people have complained about, but the legal system has not been serving women for so long and there was such frustration with it,” Portman said. “It gave women the ability to say, ‘We’re essentially being silenced and shamed and now we’re coming forward.’ There’s a real collective force when so many women come together. It’s a shame that it requires so many of us to be heard, but the force of it has the same force of a legal statement being implemented.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the controversy with Natalie Portman has severely disrupted Moby’s book tour and he has now canceled all remaining appearances.
“Moby is canceling all upcoming public appearances for the foreseeable future,” a statement says on the artist’s website. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. all tickets will be refunded at the point of purchase, and moby is happy to provide signed bookplates to everyone who bought tickets to these events.”
The “Porcelain” singer also issued an apology on his Instagram for not letting Natalie Portman know about his including her in the memoir.
“I also fully recognize that it was truly inconsiderate of me to not let her know about her inclusion in the book beforehand, and equally inconsiderate for me to not fully respect her reaction,” he said. “I have a lot of admiration for Natalie, for her intelligence, creativity, and animal rights activism, and I hate that I might have caused her and her family distress.”
