Moby: Dick.
So Moby’s in the news again. Everyone remembers Moby, right? From the 90s? You know, had that one song and then Eminem was mean to him? Those were simpler times. Back when everyone assumed men who weren’t being overtly racist or misogynistic, were definitely the good guys. Heck, that lasted well into the 00s, especially if they wore t-shirts saying they were feminists.
But then we learned. We learned that just because you sounded like a feminist and literally wrote the book on Modern Romance, that didn’t mean you treated women with dignity and/or as humans.
And so we get to Moby, who’s just released a new memoir where he claims to have briefly dated Natalie Portman back in the 90s. When he was 33, and she was uhm 20.
Here’s the thing, though. She wasn’t 20. She was 18. You don’t have to take my word for that, or indeed Natalie Portman’s. You can simply check what year they were both born, and do the maths.
Here’s the other thing, though. They never dated. Dating is a bit like sex, in that it really does need consent on all sides. You can’t one-sidedly date someone. That’s just called creeping and/or stalking. And that is what Moby did, because Natalie Portman did not consider them to have ever dated.
Upon this being pointed out to Moby, he responded by essentially calling her and liar and offering up proof of said dating in the form of a picture.
Let’s skip over the irony of Moby the Vegan creeping on someone in a t-shirt which says “milk fed”, twice, and instead focus on the fact that not only is Moby not embarrassed to admit non-consensually “dating” someone half his age, but needs you to absolutely believe that he did, at all costs, regardless of what the other party says.
This is part of an endemic trend of famous men preying on young women, and everyone acting like it’s not only perfectly acceptable but actively desirable. Everyone knows about Harvey Weinstein, of course, who incidentially was in the news today for settling out of court with several accusers. But to focus solely on the worst monsters, is to overlook just how normalised it is elsewhere.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s in the news at the moment with a new girlfriend, who is 21. He’s 44. When you’re famous the rule is “half your age +/- 1 depending on if you’re Moby or DiCaprio”. This isn’t a one-off either, someone made a chart of his girlfriend’s ages and they never make it past 25.
They say life imitates art, which may explain why the average age difference between movie love interests is astonishing. Jerry Seinfeld famously dated a 17-year-old when he was 30, Woody Allen was 56 when he first started dating the 19-year-old Soon-Yi, whose mother Mia Farrow was 21 when she married the 51-year-old Frank Sinatra.
So Moby’s in good (bad) company. But to truly get how particularly awful this is, we need a bit of background on Natalie Portman.
Her debut performance was in Léon: The Professional, where at 12 years old she played a precocious 12-year-old called Mathilda, who, after the death of her family at the hands of a corrupt DEA officer, forms an unusual relationship with the eponymous hitman, played by a 36-year-old Jean Reno.
When I was younger I loved this movie. It was one of my absolute favourites. But I just can’t appreciate it anymore, because I realise it’s less a piece of art and more a signed confession.
The film is the directorial debut of Luc Besson, who was 35 when the film was released. He also wrote the film. At the time, he was dating the 17-year-old Maïwenn Le Besco, who also briefly appears as a mostly-naked mobster’s lover credited as “Blond Babe”. Besson met Maïwenn when she was 12 years old, and they started formally dating when she was 15. Just in case you weren’t sure if the film had any basis in reality, in the DVD extras for the film Maïwenn outright states the film was based on their relationship.
In Léon, Mathilda is not only precocious but also highly sexualised. She attempts to seduce Léon, who rebuffs her advances. However, in an earlier draft of the script, they do “make love”.
MATHILDA (con't)
I want you to be the first to touch
me... The first to make love with me.
Nobody before you.
She stands up and modestly gets off her briefs without taking
off her dress. Leon cries, unable to oppose her. Mathilda is
too young, but she's also too beautiful and lovely and sweet
and tender... She sweetly, very sweetly, gets on him.
LEON(crying)
Why me, Mathilda, why me?
Mathilda leans over to speak in his ear.
MATHILDA
...Because you deserve it, Leon...
Leon embraces her. He's full of happiness, shame, so many
emotions, he can't control very well. But, hell, how
beautiful it is seeing them sweetly making love.What is poor Léon to do, when the 12-year-old temptress wants it that much? Meanwhile, Moby writes of his first encounter with Portman:
I was a bald binge drinker and Natalie Portman was a beautiful movie star. But here she was in my dressing room, flirting with me. I was 33 and she was 20[sic] but this was her world.
Isn’t it strange how the teenager always seem to be in control against the defenceless fully-grown man? Stranger still, despite public knowledge of the relationship, the pre-#MeToo media was thorougly uninterested in the extent this newly-lauded art imitated grim life.
In 1993, the year before Léon was released, Besson married the 16-year-old Maïwenn, who also gave birth to their daughter. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t last. Besson’s next film was The Fifth Element released in 1997, and Besson ditched Maïwenn for the eponymous 22-year-old Fifth Element, Milla Jovovich.
This was also apparently not considered noteworthy. I suppose marrying your barely-adult female stars is a rite of passage for any budding French director, and Besson was just channeling Jean-Luc Godard who, at age 37, married the 20-year-old Anne Wiazemsky, his leading lady in La Chinoise. Don’t worry though, Besson also divorced Milla Jovovich two years later in 1999, presumably because she was about to turn 25 aka “The Leo Limit”.
It appears separating the art from the artist is a lot easier than separating the director from the young leading lady.
If you’re wondering what happened to Maïwenn, she went on to become a director in her own right, and is most known for her 2011 film Polisse, which she also stars in as:
A photographer assigned to shadow a Child Protection Unit that tracks down pedophiles and rescues sexually exploited children
I wonder where she gets her inspiration from?
As for Luc Besson, he went on to live a quiet and scandal-free life. Just kidding! In 2018 he got caught up in #MeToo when two actresses accused him of rape. One of whom, Sand Van Roy, was dating him at the time. They met when he cast her for a small role in his 2017 film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. At the time he was 58, and her 27. After a nine month enquiry into Sand Van Roy’s allegations, French prosecutors decided not to press charges because of course they did, he’s an old rich white man, what were you expecting?
So Natalie Portman, at 12 years old, started her career by playing a lead role in Luc Besson’s twisted paedophilia propaganda piece, and then had to spend her teenage years enduring a barrage of creepy older men trying to recreate that experience in real life. Including Moby. Fucking Moby. Vegan nice guy Moby. Who then has the audacity to invent a relationship where there wasn’t one, demand recognition for his predatory impulses, and then literally fuck off to the woods when he’s called out on it.
In Moby’s new book, he also mentions briefly dating a pre-fame Lana Del Ray (Elizabeth Grant) back when he was a sprightly 41-year-old and she a, presumably precocious, 21-year-old. However, the only source on any of this happening is Moby himself, but I mean why wouldn’t we trust Moby?
I sat next to her on the piano bench and started kissing her. She kissed me back — but then stopped. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I like you. But I hear you do this with a lot of people.” I wanted to lie, to tell her that I didn’t, that I was chaste, sane, and ethical. But I said nothing. “I’d like to see you again,” she said. “Me too.”
Me too indeed.
Famous men have been given almost infinite impunity to prey upon and abuse young women. Impunity by their peers, the media, and society in general. At the low end there’s the Moby’s of the world, adamantly proclaiming they dated nigh on children back in the 90s. But the scale stretches all the way up to teenage girls quite literally being locked up in R. Kelly’s attic.
The difference is in degree, not in kind. The same toxic mindset is present in all these cases, and the apologia produced whenever any victims stick their head above the parapet is eerily consistent.
As the famous Gandhi quote goes: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they call you a liar, and then they settle out of court and remain free men.
The problem is systemic. It’s rooted in power and the abuse thereof, by men who don’t think what they’re doing is wrong. But it is wrong, and the sooner everyone stops pandering to them the better.
