Moby has cancelled all of his upcoming public appearances after he was criticised for claiming to have dated Natalie Portman, which she denied.

A book tour by the US electronic music producer to discuss his new memoir, Then It Fell Apart, was due to have included a string of UK dates. In the book he wrote in detail about a number of previous relationships and alleged he met the actress when she was 20 and that they dated briefly.

A message on his website read: “moby is canceling all upcoming public appearances for the foreseeable future. we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. all tickets will be refunded at the point of purchase, and moby is happy to provide signed bookplates to everyone who bought tickets to these events.”

Moby was scheduled to appear at the Hay Festival this weekend as well as the Manchester Literary Festival and events at EartH in London and Dublin’s Liberty Hall to promote his second autobiography.

It follows a furore over the 53-year-old’s disputed account of his encounters with Portman, 37, who said there were “many factual errors and inventions” in his writing and that she was surprised “to hear that 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 just had graduated high school”.

She added: “He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me.”

Moby initially contested her assertion that they had not dated, posting a since deleted picture of them together, saying that her account “confused me, as we did, in fact, date”.

He added: “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.”

The producer later publicly apologised to her and acknowledged that many of the criticisms made towards him were “very valid”.

In an Instagram post on Tuesday he said he was going to take time away from the public eye, but that he wanted to apologise once more and take responsibility for the entire episode.

“I am the one who released the book without showing it to the people I wrote about,” he wrote. “I’m the one who posted defensively and arrogantly. I’m the one who behaved inconsiderately and disrespectfully, both in 2019 and in 1999. There is obviously no one else to blame but me.”