Natalie Portman brands singer Moby’s claims ‘creepy’ and ‘inappropriate’

Actress Natalie Portman has responded to singer Moby’s claims that the pair dated when she was just 18 – almost two decades older than him – insisting he’s using her name to create controversy and sell his biography. The media tends to put the onus on young women who date famously older partners, why is it rarely the other way around, asks Jennifer McShane

Natalie Portman insists there are a number of errors detailing her in the new autobiography of singer Moby, his self-confessed ‘tell-all’ regarding his career success and supposed relationships with a number of women in the public eye.

A few weeks ago, Moby described meeting the actress backstage at one of his concerts when he was in his thirties and she was 20. “I was a bald binge-drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star,” he wrote. “But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.” He also said he “tried to be Natalie’s boyfriend for a few weeks” but it didn’t work out. Portman called him one night, he continued, to tell him that she had “met someone else and that was that.”

Only Portman herself disputes his version of the events, saying in a new interview in Harper’s Bazaar that wasn’t what happened at all.

“Disturbing to me”

“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,” Portman said.

She added: “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. There was no fact-checking from him or his publisher – it almost feels deliberate.

“That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me. It wasn’t the case. There are many factual errors and inventions. I would have liked him or his publisher to reach out to fact check.”

She says the singer suggested friendship before she herself realised she didn’t feel too comfortable with it.

“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 realised that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”

Moby himself has responded to the story, accusing Portman of “misrepresenting the truth.”

 

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I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date. 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. The story as laid out in my book Then It Fell Apart is accurate, with lots of corroborating photo evidence, etc. Thanks, Moby Ps I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me(to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too), but it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history

A post shared by moby x?x (@moby) on May 22, 2019 at 3:23am PDT

Even with Portman speaking out (and Moby’s response), the common thread in this story is that of the older man supposedly “scorned” by a younger woman. Moby himself got almost no backlash for originally saying he supposedly dated a few women at least 15 years younger – in fact, that would likely work in his favour – but if it was the opposite way around, such is the inherent gender bias – it would undoubtedly do the opposite.

What we’re used to seeing is older men date younger women, yet it’s a narrative that is more harmful to the woman. How many Daily Mail comments have you read which insist the younger woman is the golddigger for marrying the rich and powerful older man? It’s never the man that has to justify an age-gap; it’s almost always the woman who takes the backlash. Where is the barrage of comments which insist it’s creepy for a man in his late thirties to date a teenager? Actually, there are many.

Helpfully, in our post-#MeToo society, stories such as this – the man insisting on events as”facts” with little pushback (or, in this case, apparently no fact-checking) is no longer automatically accepted.

here’s the thing about Natalie Portman & Moby. Even if she had “dated” him, she was 18, he was 34. I ”dated” 23 year olds when I was 14. I look back now & realize that was NOT dating & was older men being predatory. She isnt faking memory loss. She just finally realized the truth pic.twitter.com/czWmnjwAfY

— How To Be Alone (by me Lane Moore) is out now (@hellolanemoore) May 22, 2019

Hey ladies, how many times have you faked having a boyfriend, or said you’d “met someone else” to stop a guy trying it on or harassing you?

My money is on an 18-year-old Natalie Portman doing this to a 33-year-old Moby. https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/natalie-portman-brands-moby-creepy-after-he-claims-they-dated-083835926.html pic.twitter.com/hl0XOENBH0

— Hanna Ines Flint (@HannaFlint) May 22, 2019

Natalie Portman’s account of what really happened when Moby claimed they had a brief relationship when she was 20 (she was 18) in his book is simply icky. https://t.co/nLxwlGOjBl pic.twitter.com/WZRZsuVhIE

— Caitlin McBride (@mcbride_caitlin) May 22, 2019

Portman says this has been a long time coming.

“It gave women the ability to say, ‘We’re essentially being silenced and shamed and now we’re coming forward.’ There’s a real collective force when so many women come together. It’s a shame that it requires so many of us to be heard, but the force of it has the same force of a legal statement being implemented.”

Main photograph: @OfficialRodarte