Hilaria Baldwin addresses ‘fake’ Spanish accent criticisms in family’s new reality series
Hilaria Baldwin has hit back at the criticism she’s faced for her Spanish accent.
The 41-year-old yoga instructor spoke candidly about her heritage during the season premiere of her and her husband Alec Baldwin’s new show, The Baldwins, which airs on TLC on February 23.
Back in 2020, Hilaria was accused of faking her Spanish heritage, prompting her to later confirm that while she was born in Boston — under the name Hillary Haward-Thomas — she spent a lot of her childhood in Spain, where her family still lives.
However, she’s now made it clear that she won’t let the controversy about her heritage get to her.
“I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn't make me inauthentic, and when I mix the two, that makes me normal,” she said during a confessional interview in the season premiere of The Baldwins. “I'd be lying if I said [the controversy] didn't make me sad and it didn't hurt and it didn't put me in dark places.”
She emphasized that she’s learned to embrace her different heritages with the help of her friends and family.
“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,” she added. “That’s normal. That’s called being human.”
She also opened up about teaching Spanish to her and Alec’s seven children: Carmen, 11, Rafael, nine, Leonardo, eight, Romeo, six, Eduardo, four, María, three, and Ilaria, two.
“I'm raising my kids to be bilingual, I was raised bilingual,” she said. “My family — all my nuclear family — now lives over in Spain. 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.”
In December 2020, there was a viral investigation into Hilaria’s ethnicity after an X user accused the entrepreneur of impersonating “a Spanish person.” Many people shared videos of Hilaria not knowing the English word for cucumber, while others pointed out that she claimed she was born in Spain in several interviews.
After she clarified to The New York Times that she was born in Boston, she addressed the controversy again, reiterating that she was raised with two cultures, American and Spanish.
“I feel a true sense of belonging to both,” she wrote on Instagram in February 2021. “The way I’ve spoken about myself and my deep connection to two cultures could have been better explained – I should have been more clear and I'm sorry.”
Since then, she’s continued to face mockery over her Spanish accent. In January, fans lambasted her for appearing to forget the English word for onion while cooking and instead said the Spanish word, “cebollas.”
“For context, her English is her first and native language. She has been pretending to be Spanish for years now. Gotta love the dedication to the bit,” one person responded to the recent cooking video on X.
“No cause I understand forgetting certain words if you speak multiple languages, even if English is your first language cause that happens to me too. But the accent? I can’t wrap my head around it. How do you sound like that when you’re from Boston?” another wrote.
Others defended Hilaria with one person arguing: “Anyone who speaks more than one language knows very well it’s extremely common to forget regular words in your own language, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be laughing at here.”
