Hilaria Baldwin (née Hilary Hayward-Thomas) is still muy triste that she was called out for spending years using a fake Spanish accent. Well, actually, she seems to think that everyone was mad at her for being bilingual. People reports that in the premiere of her and Alec Baldwin’s upcoming TLC reality show, the former yoga instructor addressed her 2020 controversy by completely misunderstanding why people were dragging her.
“I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn’t make me inauthentic … that makes me normal,” she says in a confessional, adding that the controversy made her feel “sad” and “hurt,” and “put me in dark places.”
With all due respect to Hilaria Baldwin’s mental health, if you read this without the context, it makes it seem like she was persecuted for dropping a little Spanglish into conversation or eating dinner at 9 p.m. The real issue, for those who don’t recall, was that she appeared to have spent years lying about her name, upbringing, and country of origin. Throughout her career, Baldwin claimed she was born in Majorca and moved to the States either as a young child or for college at 19, depending on who she was talking to. In fact, as she ultimately admitted in 2020, she was born in Boston to a family whose presence in America “predated the American Revolution,” according to her grandfather’s obituary. Her parents do live in Majorca now, but that move appears to have happened about 15 years ago.
“But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things, and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” Baldwin is now telling the TLC cameras. “That’s normal, that’s called being human.”
Based on the trailer for The Baldwins, it sounds like Baldwin has now dropped the accent completely, but that doesn’t mean that her and Alec’s seven children won’t be bilingual. “I’m raising my kids to be bilingual, I was raised bilingual. My family — all my nuclear family — now lives over in Spain,” she said. “I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language. I think just growing up and speaking two languages is extremely special.”
Maybe one day one of those kids can follow in her footsteps and pretend to forget the word for cucumber on national television.