Music

Moby Cancels Book Tour Dates Following Natalie Portman Controversy


Moby has canceled the U.K. and Ireland dates of a book tour promoting his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, days after Natalie Portman criticized a passage from the text in which he describes dating the actress two decades ago. “I’m going to go away for awhile,” Moby wrote on Instagram, and a note on his website adds that he is “canceling all upcoming public appearances for the foreseeable future.”

The tour, scheduled to follow a recently wrapped American leg, was set to run June 1st through the 6th. All tickets to the canceled dates will be refunded at the point of purchase. 

In Then It Fell Apart, out June 11th in the U.S., Moby claims that Portman invited him to “meet up” after a concert in 1999, when he was 33 and she was 20. (In reality, she was 18.) “I was a bald binge drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star,” he writes. “But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.”

But Portman, in a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, rejected that description of their relationship. “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,” she said. “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18.”

She added, “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 realized that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”

In response to the article, Moby posted several photos of himself with Portman — including one in which he was shirtless. He subsequently deleted the images from Instagram and apologized to Portman.

“As some time has passed I’ve realized that many of the criticisms leveled at me regarding my inclusion of Natalie in Then It Fell Apart are very valid,” he wrote on the site. “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. I have a lot of admiration for Natalie, for her intelligence, creativity, and animal rights activism, and I hate that I might have caused her and her family distress.”

In his latest Instagram post on Tuesday, Moby continued to express remorse.

“Before I [go away] I want to apologize again, and to say clearly that all of this has been my own fault,” he wrote. “I am the one who released the book without showing it to the people I wrote about. I’m the one who posted defensively and arrogantly. I’m the one who behaved inconsiderately and disrespectfully, both in 2019 and in 1999. There is obviously no one else to blame but me. Thank you, and I’m sorry.”





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