Bad romance?: Moby has the evidence to prove his romance with Natalie Portman. In response to her denial, the 53-year-old musician has posted a photo, showing a shirtless Moby with his arm around the actress.

The caption reads: "I recently read a gossip piece where Portman said we'd never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date."

In his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, Moby said they dated when he was 33 and she was 20. But the Oscar-winning actress, 37, does not recall "kissing under the centuries-old oak trees" at her alma mater Harvard, nor leading the singer "to her dorm room (where they) lay down next to each other on her small bed". In a Harper's Bazaar article published on Tuesday, Portman noted that Moby had fudged her age.

His book says they met in early September 1999, meaning she "definitely wasn't (20)", she explained. "I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. There was no fact-checking from him or his publisher - it almost feels deliberate. There are many factual errors and inventions. I would have liked him or his publisher to reach out to fact-check."

Portman, who enjoyed Moby's music at the time, attended one of his shows shortly after graduating from high school. When they met after the performance, she recalls that 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 realised that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate."

Moby insists that after their romance fizzled, they "remained friends for years". "I completely respect Natalie's possible regret in dating me but it doesn't alter the actual fact of our brief romantic history."