Moby Responds to Natalie Portman’s Denial That They Once Dated: ‘Doesn’t Alter the Facts’

Moby is speaking out again about his past with Natalie Portman — and how their recollections of their one-time relationship differ wildly.

In a Friday, February 20 interview with U.K. newspaper The Times, the 60-year-old musician reflected on the claims he made in his 2019 memoir Then It Fell Apart, where he said he dated Portman in 1999 when he was 33 — and she was 18.

Portman, now 44, had long denied that description, saying in a 2019 interview with Harper’s Bazaar, “I was surprised to hear that he characterised 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 said.

“I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated,” she told the outlet. “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,” she said, adding, “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”

Even though she said that seven years ago, Portman’s pointed comments haven’t been forgotten by Moby.

“I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me (to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too),” Moby told The Times.  “But it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history.”

In hindsight, he added, “it’s hard for me to make sense of it.”