Portman Says 'Creepy' Moby Pursued Her at 18

Actress disputes musician's account in new memoir
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted May 22, 2019 8:56 AM CDT
Natalie Portman: No, I Didn't Date 'Creepy' Moby
Moby attends the LA premiere of "Punk" at SIR on March 4, 2019, in Los Angeles.   (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)

Musician Moby claims he touched his naked penis against Donald Trump for a bet at a party in his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, per the Guardian. Surprisingly, that's not the assertion headlines are focused on. As Harper's Bazaar reports, Natalie Portman has accused the 53-year-old of selling the book based on a fraudulent account of their friendship. "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," the actress says. Moby writes that he "tried to be Natalie's boyfriend" after the pair met in September 1999. He describes her falling asleep next to him in her Harvard dorm room, giving their ages as 33 and 20. But Portman, born in June 1981, had just turned 18.

"There was no fact-checking from him or his publisher—it almost feels deliberate," says Portman, who was a fan of the musician when she met him backstage at a show in Austin, Texas, in the months after his hit album Play dropped. "There are many factual errors and inventions" but "that he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me." She adds "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 memoir is Moby's second, following 2016's Porcelain. At the Guardian, Kitty Empire calls it a "harrowing" account of the "more perilous face of the fame mountain." And though "you highly doubt he can remember all the conversations he recounts … Moby makes for a compelling Virgil." (Both Portman and Moby changed their names.)

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