Hilaria Baldwin

Hilaria Baldwin Claps Back After Being Accused of Faking Spanish Accent

In emotional Instagram videos, Hilaria Baldwin slams cancel culture and sets the record straight about her accent and ethnicity after both were questioned on Twitter

Alec Baldwin and Hilaria Baldwin
Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Hilaria Baldwin is not going to apologize for who she is or sit down and be canceled after her accent and ethnicity were questioned on social media.

Last week, one Twitter user did a deep dive into the life of the 36-year-old yoga instructor and wife of Alec Baldwin, sharing links to her past TV interviews and citing her "Fake Spanish accent." The person then questioned Hilaria's Spanish roots altogether, noting that she grew up in Massachusetts and used to go by the name Hillary when she was a student. The thread has since gone viral, spurring much discussion as well as mockery.

In a video posted on Instagram on Sunday, Alec's wife of eight years got emotional while talking about the backlash. She addressed questions about her accent, saying, "If I've been speaking a lot of Spanish, I tend to mix them and if I'm speaking more English...then I mix that."

"It's one of those things that's always been a little bit, I've been a little insecure about," she said, adding that she starts to mix languages when she feels nervous or upset.

"I try to speak more clearly in each language. I think that that's something that I should try to do but sometimes I mess it up and it's not something that I'm like, playing at, so I want that to be very, very, very clear."

"I kind of want to say just leave me alone," Hilaria said. "Leave me alone. I'm not doing anything wrong by being me and maybe that doesn't look like somebody who you've met before, but I mean, isn't that the beauty of diversity?"

The fitness expert refused to apologize for her unique experience, adding, "There's nothing wrong with me and I'm not going to apologize for the amount of time that I spent in two countries and I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I speak two languages and I'm not going to apologize for the fact that I have two versions of my name."

Alec Baldwin &Hilaria Thomas: Road to Romance

She said, "It just feels like somebody wakes up and they're like, 'Oh, you! Let's go after you today.' I don't understand that," explaining that her words from a past podcast interview were misconstrued to "create a narrative because you're bored and at home, or something."

The yoga instructor also clarified more facts about herself.

"First thing I told my husband is that I was born in Boston," Hilaria said. "I spent a lot of my childhood in Spain. My family, my nuclear family lives in Spain and has lived there for a long time...I was moving around a lot but I came here when I was 19 years old to go to college."

Upset by the controversy, she contacted her brother, who told her, "What do you care? It's the Internet. Like who cares?" She also posted a screenshot of their text message conversation.

"I care because I feel like my thing is about being authentic," the star told her viewers. "And then if people say that I'm not being authentic, it hurts my feelings."

Hilaria and Alec live in New York with their five kids: daughter Carmen, 7, and sons Rafael, 5, Leonardo, 4, Romeo, 2, and Eduardo, 3 months. The busy mom has spoken before about raising the children to be bilingual.

"I'm really lucky that I grew up speaking two languages," Hilaria said in another video posted on her Instagram earlier Sunday. "And I'm trying to raise my kids so that they speak two languages too."

In her second video, she got emotional talking about how she has not seen her family in Spain since last year and expressed sorrow that they are not yet able to meet her and Alec's new baby.

Hilaria also explained the confusion over her name.

"When I was growing up, in this country, I would use the name Hillary and in Spain, I would use the name Hilaria and...my whole family would call me Hilaria."

She said it bothered her that "neither name sounded good in the other language" and so she used both names depending on the situation and that a few years before she met Alec, she "decided to consolidate the two" to avoid confusion, especially when it came to using them on documents and prescriptions. The star also said that she identifies more with "Hilaria" because that's what her family calls her.

Hilaria also clarified her ethnicity.

"I am a white girl. Let's be very clear that Europe has a lot of white people in there," she said. "My family is white. Ethnically, I am a mix of many, many, many things. Culturally, I grew up with two cultures. So it's really as simple as that."

Hilaria said she wanted to take the issue seriously because of an increase in "cultural conversations."

"But as you get older, you just kind of just embrace who you are and just kind of want to be open about and that's what I'm trying to do here."

Copyright E! Online
Contact Us