Natalie Portman brands Moby 'creepy and inappropriate' after he claims they dated

Natalie Portman has dispute claims by Moby that the pair dated, branding his behaviour at the time as 'creepy'.

In his memoir Then It Fell Apart, his second, released earlier this month, the 53-year-old musician says that he and Portman met backstage at one of his shows 20 years ago.

He says in the book that she was 20 at the time, and that she had flirted with but Portman has now said that she had only just turned 18.

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“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, now 37, told Harpers Bazaar.

“He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. 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.”

Portman goes on to say that she was shocked to read the claims, and that she wasn't contacted beforehand to substantiate them.

“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,” she added.

“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.”

In the book, the musician behind tracks like Porcelain and rave classic Go writes: “I was a bald binge drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star.

“But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me. ‘I was 33 and she was 20 but this was her world.”

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Moby, born Richard Melville Hall, adds that he ‘tried to be Natalie’s boyfriend’ but that it ‘hadn’t worked out’.

“I thought that I was going to have to tell her that my panic was too egregious for me to be in a real relationship, but one night on the phone she informed me that she’d met somebody else,” he adds.

“I was relieved that I’d never have to tell her how damaged I was.”

In the same book, Moby also reveals how he once ‘knob-touched’ Donald Trump at a party.