There are two sides to every story. While Natalie Portman is adamant that she and Moby never dated, the “Porcelain” singer has a different recollection of the pair’s past relationship.
“I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date,” the musician, 53, captioned a throwback picture of himself and Portman, 37, via Instagram on Wednesday, May 22. “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.”
While the Grammy nominee does not agree with the Black Swan actress’ memory, he harbors no animosity toward her. “I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me(to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too),” he added on Instagram. “But it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history.”
Moby claimed in his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, that he and the Oscar winner dated when they were 33 and 20, respectively. (Given their age difference, Portman would have been a teenager when Moby was 33.) The “Extreme Ways” crooner recalled in the book, which was released on May 2: “At midnight she brought me to her [Harvard University] 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.”
The singer-songwriter said he “tried to be Natalie’s boyfriend,” but she told him she had met someone else.
Portman, for her part, has a different account of their past. “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 in an interview published on Tuesday, May 21. “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”
As for what the Avengers: End Game star’s recollection of the time they spent together? “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 Harvard graduate married French choreographer Benjamin Millepied in 2012. The pair share two children: son Aleph, 7, and daughter Amalia, 2.
