Get ready for Hilaria Baldwin to not set the record straight in her new reality TV show on she, a Boston-born yoga teacher, spent more than 10 years presenting herself as Alec Baldwin’s glamorous “Latina” wife from Spain, before internet sleuths outed her for all the times she faked an immigrant identity and used a Spanish accent in media interviews.
According to the Daily Mail and the Los Angeles Times, the premiere episode for “The Baldwins,” Hilaria and Alec Baldwin’s TLC reality series, premieres Sunday, and it shows the 41-year-old mother of seven explaining that it’s always been “normal” for her to mix English and Spanish. The mixing of languages is the result of her bilingual upbringing, she says.
“My nuclear family now lives over in Spain,” Hilaria Baldwin says, referring to her American-born parents who moved to Mallorca from Boston after retiring. “I think just growing up speaking two languages is extremely special. I love English and I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic.”
“When I mix the two, it makes me normal!” Hilaria Baldwin continued.
But Hilaria Baldwin didn’t become a tabloid figure, embroiled in a bizarre controversy over her identity in late 2020, just because she sometimes mixed up the two languages in her public appearances. The Atlantic labeled her an “identity hoaxer,” alongside the likes of Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, after she spent years presenting herself as “nebulously Hispanic” before being forced to admit that she was born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas to white, English-speaking Bostonian parents.
Hilaria Baldwin admitted to her Boston background after people on Twitter, Instagram and Reddit revealed her “decade-long grift of impersonating a Spanish person.” They produced multiple examples of Baldwin 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.
Perhaps most infamously, the aspiring lifestyle influencer appeared during a cooking segment on the “Today” show in 2015. As she was preparing gazpacho, she said in accented English: “We have tomatoes, we have, um, how do you say in English? Cucumber!”
Video also emerged of Hilaria Baldwin clearly trying to mislead officials at the United Nations in 2019. The video shows her speaking at a special UN session on healthy eating and the environment, during which she allows a top public health official to identify her as “half-Spanish.” Again speaking with an accent, she encourages his belief that she grew up in Spain by speaking about that country’s food culture. “And so in Spain, we eat a lot of dairy,” she said.
Questions also arose over how much Alec Baldwin knew, or was even complicit in, his wife’s alleged grift and cultural appropriation. The Emmy-winning “30 Rock” actor was present during his wife’s UN presentation. He also was shown in a 2013 David Letterman interview, saying his wife was “from Spain” as he jokingly imitated her Spanish accent.
Public records show that Hilaria Baldwin’s parents, attorney David Thomas and Harvard Medical School professor Kathryn Hayward, bought a five-bedroom, five-bath house in Boston’s Beacon Hill area in June 1987 when Hilaria was just three, the Daily Mail reported. Her parents didn’t leave that home until their daughter turned 28. Neighbors remembered her as “a very entitled young lady” and don’t recall her ever speaking with a Spanish accent, the Daily Mail said.
Hilaria Baldwin 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. In defending her behavior in 2021, she claimed that while she was born in Boston, she spent “some” of her childhood in Spain.
The Baldwins’ new show offers a glimpse of the couple’s privileged yet chaotic family life. It follows Hilaria Baldwin, her 66-year-old husband, their seven children and their “menagerie of pets” in the weeks leading up to his 2024 trial for involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 movie-set shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, the Los Angeles Times reported.
In the premiere episode, “Along Came Hilaria,” the former parenting podcaster also talks about how her Spanish-identity scandal left her feeling “sad,” the Daily Mail reported. But it doesn’t sound as though she’s willing to acknowledge that it was a scandal of her own making.
“I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places,” Hilaria Baldwin says.
“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 is going to have an impact on how we sound and how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” Hilaria Baldwin says.
This justification is reminiscent of one she offered back in July 2021, when she claimed that she’s a “multi” who lives in “a brilliant fluidity” of cultural identities. Hilaria and Alec Baldwin also famously gave Spanish names to all their seven children: Carmen Gabriela, 10, Rafael Thomas, 8, Leonardo Angel Charles, 7, Romeo Alejandro David, 6, Eduardo Pao Lucas, 3, Maria Lucia Victoria, 3, and Ilaria Catalina Irena, 2.
