Moby Needs to Log Off

The press surrounding Moby’s (second!) memoir Then It Fell Apart has been dominated by his insistence that he briefly dated Natalie Portman while she was at Harvard University, even after Portman categorized their relationship as nothing more than “a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school.” It was bad before, but now it’s getting worse as Moby continues to stir the pot.

In an Instagram post, Moby posted three photos of himself and a much younger Natalie Portman, as well as a text-only post that says, “sincerely, what should I do when people believe the accusations and not evidence?” Hmm… the evidence here is that Portman called Moby a liar and a creep, so it’s probably best to just leave it at that.

The photos are accompanied by a much longer caption, but it could have been replaced with Moby writing, “Please, just let me have this.” He unleashes an arsenal of adjectives and adverbs here to qualify that he really believes he did date Portman despite her account of their interactions, and to reassert that he’s done nothing wrong, now or then:

In my memoir Then It Fell Apart I respectfully and honestly describe the brief, innocent, and consensual romantic involvement I had with Natalie Portman in 1999.

Moby points to “ample photographic evidence that [he and Portman] briefly dated and then were friends,” when in fact, these photos only prove that they were in the same place at the same time.

Moby seems to resent that his character has been called into question, but the fact remains that his book claims he had a relationship with Portman when she was 20 and he was 33, while Portman says she knew him at 18, just out of high school. That’s gross, and it’s everyone’s right to say so if they feel so inclined. (Moby also says that he’s been getting violent threats, which is unfortunate and unnecessary, but also the default experience of most women on the internet, famous or not.) In another Instagram post, Moby posted a photo of some trees and wrote, “You know what’s nice? That nature doesn’t care.” Dude, just log off.