When Hilaria Baldwin makes public appearances, she sometimes, though not always, does so with a Spanish accent. She even has a Spanish first name! But last week the former yoga instructor and wife of former Trump impersonator Alec Baldwin came under fire for, as one person on Twitter put it, “her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.” Now Baldwin has responded, explaining that she’s in fact a white woman born in Boston. And her name is actually Hillary.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CJTiwHiDX7X/?utm_source=ig_embed
In a seven-minute video posted to Instagram, Baldwin tried to set a pretty confusing story straight. “I’ve seen chatter online questioning my identity and culture,” she wrote in the caption:
“This is something I take very seriously,and for those who are asking— I’ll reiterate my story, as I’ve done many times before. I was born in Boston and grew up spending time with my family between Massachusetts and Spain. My parents and sibling live in Spain and I chose to live here, in the USA. We celebrate both cultures in our home—Alec and I are raising our children bilingual, just as I was raised. This is very important to me. I understand that my story is a little different, but it is mine, and I’m very proud of it.”
Of course, Baldwin’s story does need some explaining. As Page Six noted, her bio on her agency’s speaker site claims that she was born on the Spanish island of Mallorca, as did the opening to a 2016 interview with Hola! Then there are her media appearances, in which she rocks a clear Spanish accent and even appeared to forget the English word for “cucumber.”
https://twitter.com/lenibriscoe/status/1341103380899442689
But after she got into a rift with Amy Schumer over a postpartum photo she took of her slim figure, Baldwin suddenly ditched the Spanish accent, sounding thoroughly American. And now we know why. In the wake of the tweet that outed her true origins, internet sleuths reached out to former classmates, one of whom said, “I went to high school with her. Genuinely lovely person, I recall, but fully a white girl from Cambridge.” Another said, “I went to high school with her. She was perfectly nice and serious about ballroom dancing. Her name was indeed Hillary Hayward-Thomas and she did not have her current accent.”
That Baldwin spent much of her childhood in Spain appears to be true, and her passion for the culture extends to raising her and Alec’s children bilingual. In the video she talks about “consolidating” her two identities, saying, “In this country I would use the name Hillary. In Spain, I would use the name Hilaria. I identify more as Hilaria because that’s what my family calls me.”
She added, “Yes, I am a white girl … Europe has a lot of white people in there. My family is white. Ethnically, I am a mix of many many many things,” she said. “Culturally, I grew up with two cultures. So it’s really as simple as that.” Or maybe not that simple. In any case, some people found something, if you will, romantic about her marriage to Alec Baldwin.
I don’t think two people have ever deserved each other more than Alec and Hilaria Baldwin.
— Michelle Collins (@michcoll) December 27, 2020
(Via Page Six)