Natalie Portman is "surprised" that Moby "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."

"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.... 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."

From "Natalie Portman on Moby, Harvey Weinstein and the documentary that turned her vegan/Ahead of her new documentary on factory farming, the Oscar-winning actress talks to us about what's on her mind right now" (Harper's Bazaar).

So... she did go out with him a few times and then she realized he was sexually attracted to her? And that makes him "creepy"... just because he was so much older. If she was 18, I think that means he was 34. Does he really deserve to be attacked as creepy? If she was a fan, she knew how old he is. If she went out with him — she, a beautiful woman — how could it come as a surprise to her that he was sexually interested? If she decided she wasn't interested and she broke it off and that was that, why is there anything that requires him to be publicly attacked as a creep?

Now, I happen to already have Moby's memoir. (Some other news story caused me to buy it (I forget what).) I can check. Maybe he portrayed her in a negative light and she needs to take a shot at him. After a show in Austin, she was waiting for him. She asked to meet up with him in New York:

This was confusing. I was a bald binge drinker who lived in an apartment that smelled like mildew and old bricks, and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me. 

He is the small and meek one. He explains that as "a left-wing punk-rocker," he "had always decried celebrity culture." His "normal existence was flat and filled with doubt" and now, here was this "new life" opening up to him, and it was "magical." He imagines his 19-year-old self questioning him for "buying into this celebrity bullshit." The answer to that (from his 30ish self) was: "But look, there’s Natalie Portman, and she’s being nice to me." We see Moby and Natalie together in her dorm room (at Harvard). They're lying down "on her small bed."

After she fell asleep I carefully extracted myself from her arms and took a taxi back to my hotel. And I started panicking. I tried to assuage the panic with logic, telling myself that it was unwarranted, as I’d only been on a few dates with Natalie. 

Dates! The word to which she objects. Is lying on a dorm bed together not a date — so much not a date that a man is a creep to think that you are dating? In the end, as he tells it, he's engulfed by his panic:

When I was single I was safe, according to the deep, broken neural mechanism that harbored the panic. On some level I understood that my brain was trying to protect me, but unfortunately it categorized emotional intimacy in the same synaptic bunker as fleeing a burning building or being chased by a bear. The sun was rising over Logan airport, so I got out of bed. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror: bald, skinny, exhausted, sad.... Then I was scared, because I didn’t know if I was sane.... And sane people didn’t find themselves panicking in hotel rooms because they’d gone on a few pleasant dates with a kind, beautiful, vegetarian movie star...

But before he can tell her that, she calls to say she's found someone else.

That's it. That's what's in the book. Sounds like he's a mess and she's with-it enough to be studying at Harvard. He does mention the age difference: "I was thirty-three and she was twenty, but this was her world." And he does get her age wrong. She's right about that. It's stupid not to fact check something so checkable, and it throws all his softer, less checkable facts into doubt. And — just to take him at his own words — maybe there is something creepy about a man that old imagining that he's really, mentally, the one with the naiveté disadvantage.