Moby issued an apology to Natalie Portman after she took offense to, and openly disputed, allegations he made about dating her. But it's not for insisting the two dated in the late 90's.
To recap, in his memoir 'Then It Fell Apart,' released in early May, the now 53-year-old musician wrote that he met the actress in 1999, when he was 33 and she was 20. (In reality, she was 18.) He said she flirted with him in his dressing room, and they dated briefly thereafter—details now 37-year-old Portman rejected in a May interview with Harper's Bazaar.
"I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated. 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," said Portman. "That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me … I would have liked him or his publisher to reach out to fact check."
The Oscar-winning actress expressed that she was "surprised" to hear that Moby considered their time spent together to be dating, as she recalled the whole thing as "a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school."
Moby communicated on Instagram twice that he briefly dated Portman and alleged that since the controversy began between them, her fans have sent him "anonymous threats of violence."
But on Saturday, he took again to Instagram to pen a much different post. He said: "As some time has passed I've realized that many of the criticisms leveled at me regarding my inclusion of Natalie in 'Then It Fell Apart' are very valid. 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 ... I hate that I might have caused her and her family distress."
Moby also said that he tried to treat everyone in his book "with dignity and respect" and that "given the dynamic of our almost 14-year age difference I absolutely should've acted more responsibly and respectfully when Natalie and I first met almost 20 years ago."
Moby is, in fact, 16 years older than Portman.
Uncommon Knowledge
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About the writer
Hayley Prokos is an entertainment fellow at Newsweek. On the beat, she reports on viral news, as well as film, ... Read more
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