Moby has apologised to Natalie Portman after saying they had once dated and then doubling down on his story after the actress said they had not.
The 53-year-old musician made the claim in his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, where he wrote that the pair dated briefly when he was 33 and she was a 20-year-old student at Harvard.
This week, Portman countered that the two had not dated and that she remembered their relationship as a “much older man being creepy with me.” She also clarified she was actually 18 at the time, not 20.
Moby then accused Portman of lying, posting three old photos on Instagram that showed him and Portman posing together with his arm around her.
On Saturday, however, Moby posted an apology on Instagram ― though he did not explicitly walk back his claims that they dated.
“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,” he wrote.
He also conceded that he should have let Portman know the role she played in his memoir before it came out.
“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 [sic]” Moby wrote.
In addition to denying that she and Moby had been dating, she also accused both him and the memoir’s publisher of sloppiness with basic facts, like her age at the time.
“There was no fact checking from him or his publisher ― it almost feels deliberate,” she said in the Harper’s Bazaar UK interview in which she first spoke about the situation.