Moby apologized to Natalie Portman for saying in his memoir without her permission that they had a brief romantic relationship, writing Saturday, “given the dynamic of our almost 14 year [sic] age difference I absolutely should’ve acted more responsibly and respectfully when Natalie and I first met.”
In Moby’s upcoming memoir “Then It Fell Apart,” he wrote that he dated Portman when she was 20 and he was 33. Portman has disputed that, saying, “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.”
Saturday, Moby took to Instagram to offer a mea culpa:
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 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. I tried to treat everyone I included in Then It Fell Apart with dignity and respect, but nonetheless it was truly inconsiderate for me to not let them know before the book was released. So for that I apologize, to Natalie, as well as the other people I wrote about in Then It Fell Apart without telling them beforehand. Also I accept 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.
The Guardian quoted a passage of Moby’s book in which he said he met Portman at Harvard I, where she went to school, and that they could sometimes be found there “kissing under the centuries-old oak trees.”
Portman characterized their relationship differently.
“I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated,” Portman 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.”
