Four years after Hilaria Baldwin mired herself and her husband Alec Baldwin in a scandal over her alleged “decade-long grift” to fake a Spanish immigrant identity, the Boston-born influencer was caught in a holiday video last week speaking in a Spanish accent as she prepared a traditional Spanish dish for her holiday guests.
Videos published by the Daily Mail and shared on the Hilaria Baldwin Reddit thread show the mother of seven, dressed in a plaid onesie and standing in her kitchen with friends, identified by her Reddit followers as a Colombian friend and his restaurateur husband. Hilaria Baldwin can be heard in the video, boasting in a performative-sounding Spanish accent about the authenticity of her recipe for tortilla española, or Spanish omelette, as she and one of the men each cook their own versions of the dish.
Hilaria Baldwin is heard in the the video, telling the men, “I learned this from when I was a kid, don’t look it up online because you’ll learn something different.” At one point, her voice also sounds child-like as she pronounces, YouTube, “JuTube.” She also said that the secret to her tortilla are potatoes, “not cut too tiny.”
Turning to the friend who is cooking alongside her, Hilaria Baldwin then appears to forget either the English word or Spanish word for “onions.” As she looks inquiringly to her friend, she said, “My husband (Alec Baldwin) hates … cebolla?”
It’s not the first time that Hilaria Baldwin has searched for a word for an ingredient while using a faux Spanish accent as she is being filmed cooking — as if to convince viewers, or herself, that English isn’t her first language.
Very famously, Hilaria Baldwin appeared in a six-minute cooking segment on the “Today” show when she was trying to convince the public that she was Alec Baldwin’s glamorous Latina wife as she built a lucrative lifestyle brand. As she demonstrated making an “authentic” gazpacho, she named the ingredients she would be using. But she made it sound like she forgot the English name of one ingredient.
“We have very few ingredients,” she told one of the hosts. “We have tomatoes, we have, um, how do you say in English? Cucumber!”
Baldwin was accused of cultural appropriation and being an “identity hoaxer” in late 2020, after people on social media shared multiple, well-documented examples of her using a fluctuating Spanish accent in TV or podcast interviews over the years. In those interviews, and in others for Spanish-language publications, she also let herself be described as being born in Spain, having family who come from Spain, or being a “native” Spanish speaker.
A video even emerged of Baldwin trying to mislead officials at the United Nations about her cultural identity in 2019. The video showed her speaking at a special UN session on healthy eating and the environment, during which she allowed a top public health official to identify her as “half-Spanish.” She responded to his questions with a mild Spanish accent and encouraged his belief that she grew up in Spain by appearing to speak with familiarity about that country’s food culture.
Hilaria Baldwin, who married Alec Baldwin in 2012, was actually born and raised in Massachusetts, with parents who were wealthy professionals. She appeared to have regularly vacationed on the Island of Majorca, where her retired parents now live as ex-patriates.
After the scandal broke, Hilaria Baldwin admitted to being “a white girl” from Boston but initially blamed the media for falsely reporting that she was born in Spain, until it became clear that she never bothered to correct the many reports.
More than six months later, she explained on Instagram that she’s a “multi” who lives in “a brilliant fluidity” of cultural identities. In a lengthy post, it appeared that she was trying to justify her alleged effort to mislead people by adopting the language of groups who are genuinely marginalized in society because of their culture, language, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity.
“When you are multi, it can feel hard to belong,” Baldwin at the time. “You are constantly going back and forth, trying to be more this or more that. You feel you have to explain why you are the way you are, trying to fit into a world of labels when there might not be one that perfectly defines you.”
Baldwin continued: “We need to normalize the fact that we are all unique — our culture, languages, sexual orientations, religions, political beliefs are ALLOWED TO BE FLUID.”
When it’s come to the Baldwins and scandal in recent years, people’s attention eventually turned from Hilaria Baldwin’s Spanish heritage drama to the even bigger controversy involving her husband. In October 2021, Alec Baldwin accidentally shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the New Mexico set of his Western film “Rust.” Baldwin became mired in civil lawsuits and efforts by Santa Fe, New Mexico authorities to prosecute him on involuntary manslaughter charges. Over the summer, a judge dismissed the charges against Baldwin after ruling that the prosecution withheld evidence.
But the Hutchins tragedy didn’t stop Hilaria and Alec Baldwin from pursuing a new joint, professional project. They will co-star in a TLC reality TV show about their hectic lives as the parents of seven young children. The show is expected to air this coming year.
When the couple announced the project in an Instagram video in June, Hilaria Baldwin’s Spanish accent was gone. However, that didn’t stop people on Alec Baldwin’s Instagram video from asking, “Where did her Spanish accent go ?! Did she decide to drop the whole act after she was outed? Lmao makes sense.”
