"For a few weeks I had tried to be Natalie's boyfriend, but 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," Moby wrote.
But Portman hit back in an interview with UK Harper's Bazaar: "I was surprised 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 had just graduated high school.
"He said I was 20, I wasn't. I had just turned 18.
Natalie Portman aged 18. Photo / News Corp Australia
"That he used this story to sell his book was disturbing," she said. "We hung out a handful of times before I realised this was an older man interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate."
Moby then responded by saying "I completely respect Natalie's possible regret in dating me (to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too), but it doesn't alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history."
"I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we'd never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date. And after briefly dating in 1999 we remained friends for years," he wrote. "I like Natalie, and I respect her intelligence and activism. But, to be honest, I can't figure out why she would actively misrepresent the truth about our (albeit brief) involvement," Moby continued. "The story as laid out in my book Then It Fell Apart is accurate, with lots of corroborating photo evidence, etc."
