Did Maroon 5 Frontman Shag Sharapova? Or Is He Snagged in Tangled International Gossip Net?

Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine is denying making statements about tennis star Maria Sharapova’s stoic bedside manner that pervaded the Internet late last week. “She wouldn’t make any noise during sex,” was how Mr. Levine was quoted in Moscow-based Exile magazine. “I can’t tell you how disappointed I was,” he supposedly went on. “I really thought, like a lot of guys, that she’d be the loud screaming type. But instead, she just lay there like a dead frog. She even got angry if I started to moan, said it ‘ruined her concentration.’”

On Monday, Aug. 20, Mr. Levine’s publicist, Dvora Vener Englefield, attempted damage control. ”The quote is absolutely not true,” she wrote in a statement. “Adam never said this, and they only met once at Maria’s birthday party in 2004.”

When confronted with this denial, Mark Ames, an editor of Exile, e-mailed that the piece had been written in five minutes from a hotel room in California, and was intended as “throwaway satire” to fill space. “Americans are the most gullible fucking morons on Planet Earth,” he snarled.

One friend of the returning U.S. Open champ, however, remarked that the press release from the singer’s camp was not entirely forthcoming. “They did meet when Maroon 5 played for her 18th birthday,” at an April 9, 2005 party at the New York nightclub Hiro, said this source. “But then they dated for a couple weeks.” Though, she added: “I think it fizzled.”

A person close to Mr. Levine reported that he’s moved on in any case, currently seeing a “cute blonde, like 21” that he met at the Palms steakhouse in Las Vegas, where she was working as a hostess.

Ms. Sharapova, meanwhile, did not return a call for comment about her love matches.