LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Natalie Portman is going through a tough time currently as her marriage with her ballet dancer husband Benjamin Millepied has been rocked by affair allegations. As per reports, Millepied has allegedly been romantically involved with a 25-year-old climate activist Camille Étienne.
An insider told Page Six, “They [Portman and Millepied] have not split and are trying to work things out. Ben is doing everything he can to get Natalie to forgive him. He loves her and their family,” before adding, “She is incredibly private. Her biggest focus right now is protecting the kids.”
‘His book was very disturbing to me’
However, this is not the first time, the 41-year-old actress has experienced trouble. A few years ago, she opened up about her not-so-pleasant experience with Moby. In 2019, the musician released a memoir, ‘Then It Fell Apart’, in which he said that he and Portman dated each other in 1999.
The 57-year-old also asserted that the ‘Black Swan’ star was 20 at the time and his age was 33 before claiming Portman ended the relationship. However, the Academy Award-winning actress’ version was quite different. She told Harper's Bazaar, “I was surprised to hear that he 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.”
Portman continued, “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.”
She also added, “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 realized that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate.”
‘I apologize to Natalie’
Moby, however, did not hold back initially after Portman’s interview as he reportedly took to Instagram to take a dig at her. In a now-deleted post, he shared a few pictures with her and wrote, “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. But she’s denying that we ever dated, even though in the past she’s publicly discussed our involvement. And there’s ample photographic evidence that we briefly dated and then were friends (some pictures included in this post).”
But eventually, the recording artist apparently realized his mistake as he released a statement saying, “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. 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.”
Moby went on to note, “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,” before adding, “So for that, I apologize, to Natalie, as well as the other people I wrote about in Then It Fell Apart without telling them beforehand. Also, 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.”
