Faber tight-lipped on Moby memoir row

Faber has declined to comment on actress Natalie Portman’s allegation that musician Moby’s recently published memoir features “many factual errors and inventions” namely a relationship between them.

Faber Social published Then It Fell Apart, billed as “shocking and riotously entertaining” earlier this month. According to the Times it records a relationship between the two high profile figures: “Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me.”

Portman has denied that a relationship took place in a US magazine published online on Thursday (23rd May), refuting the descriptions in Moby's 416-page autobiography.

“Natalie Portman has something she wants to get off her chest,” the Harper’s Bazaar interview reads. “We’re here to talk about a new documentary that she’s narrated on the horrors of factory farming, but there’s another subject she wants to tell the truth about—namely reports the musician Moby made about her in his recent memoir which claim that the two briefly dated.”

“In his new book, the US singer alleges that Portman flirted with him in his dressing room when he was 33 and she was 20. He goes on to claim that the two started dating and that he ‘tried to be her boyfriend’, but eventually she broke it off after meeting someone else—news that came as some relief to him as it meant not having to tell her about his anxiety issues.

“None of this is how Portman remembers it and she wants to put the record straight.”

The actress told Harper's Bazaar: “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.”

The interview has now been picked up by a number of other media outlets and sparked a discussion about the power relationships between older men and younger women.

Faber, which distributed the title in the US, told The Bookseller that it would not commenting on Portman’s interview.

Moby has responded to Portman's interview on Instagram, insisting the pair did date and were friends for a number of years.

Moby’s book deal with Faber’s events and publishing imprint was billed as the “journey into the dark heart of fame and the demons that lurk beneath the bling and bluster of the celebrity lifestyle” and announced last Frankfurt Book Fair. It was a follow-up memoir to Porcelain, which Faber issued in 2016. It was acquired by Lee Brackstone, who leads the events and publishing imprint but is leaving to head up a new music-centred imprint at Orion, following 23 years with Faber.