For years now, there were rumors about Hilaria Thomas/Baldwin. I remember hearing, when Alec Baldwin first married Hilaria, that she was lying about parts of her backstory, that no one should call her “Alec Baldwin’s Spanish wife,” that her accent was fake, and on and on. My point is that those rumors and stories were out there for a while. Before now, no one really put those rumors down in a compelling story, with evidence of Hilaria’s real background or her come-and-go Spanish accent. Then a Twitter thread happened – which has now been locked – where someone accused Hilaria of a decade-long grift of completely lying about her Spanish origins. They said she grew up in Massachusetts, not Spain, with non-Spanish parents, and that she’s just a white girl named Hillary who fakes her background and her accent. A summary, courtesy of the Daily Beast:
Last week, a Twitter sleuth sketched out how Hilaria Baldwin, the influencer wife of actor (and sometime SNL star) Alec Baldwin, has perpetrated “a decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.” The user, who goes by the handle @lenibriscoe, shared a number of damning videos of “Hilaria,” from a Good Morning America appearance where she employed a Spanish accent to a Today show stop in which she supposedly could not remember the English word for “cucumber.”
Further posts showed Hilaria’s mother discussing growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, and numerous articles pointed to how she had spent virtually her entire career practicing medicine in Massachusetts, where she’d served as “an associate physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School” until she “retired from both positions in 2012,” according to MassLive. (In a video interview she said she moved to Mallorca, Spain, in 2011, the same year Hilaria began dating Alec.) An obituary for Hilaria’s grandfather on her father’s side stated that he was an American with roots in the country that “pre-dated the American Revolution,” while a wedding announcement indicated that her grandfather’s first wife (and mother of their children) hailed from Nebraska.
Hilaria Baldwin’s CAA speaker page claims that she was born in Mallorca, Spain, as does her IMDb bio and Wikipedia page. She said on a podcast earlier this year: “I moved here [to America] when I was 19 to go to NYU from… my family lives in Spain, they live in Mallorca,” adding, “I knew no pop culture.” She has graced the cover of Hola! magazine, a Spanish-language publication based out of Madrid, where she was identified as a Spanish person in both the interview and its press release. Alec Baldwin has repeatedly referred to her as “Spanish” online. And she’s made a number of appearances in Latina magazine, which she’s enthusiastically promoted (Spain is not a part of Latin America, by the way), and has referred to Spain as her “home.”
If that weren’t enough, her five young children with Baldwin all have Spanish names.
It appears that Hilaria’s real name is Hillary Hayward-Thomas, according to her old MySpace page and those who claim to be her old classmates. She attended the private Cambridge School of Weston, in Massachusetts, and in her senior yearbook is listed as “Hillary Hayward-Thomas”.
So, yeah. For me, it’s the “lying about her Spanish background and faking a completely hokey Spanish accent” that is really infuriating. She is literally just Hillary Thomas, a boring white American from Massachusetts who visited Spain a couple of times and decided to adopt a new persona using a fake accent and fake familial backstory. It’s similar to what Rachel Dolezal did only this time Hillary wanted the “exoticism” of a Spanish background.
Well, now Hillary is defending herself in a bonkers new Instagram video in which she completely drops her phony Spanish accent and claims that all of her lies about her background were simple misunderstandings and she never misrepresented herself. MY GOD. She still claims to have grown up in Boston AND Spain, but all of her former classmates in Boston remember her as Hillary with no trace of Spanish accent, and there’s no evidence that she spent significant time (beyond one or two childhood vacations) during her formative years in Spain.
If you haven’t been following the Hilaría Baldwin or Hillary Baldwin you need to get on that. She’s been selling herself as Penelope Cruz when really she’s a Boston born Rachel Dolezal.
Go to Tracie Morrissey’s IG, there’s also looonnnnggg Reddit threads. 😅 #hilariabaldwin pic.twitter.com/s7tQGrnUOo
— Mostly Unpopular Bravo opinions (@estela_g6) December 27, 2020
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
The memes about this on Twitter had me dying 😭😭😭.
I always saw her as a white American with a stupid name. Never even occurred to me she was out there pretending to be white from Spain. Pure beige in appearance and personality. I guess that’s why she thought she needed to make herself “interesting”–because of the beige of it all. I’ve spent time in Spain–she doesn’t look or carry herself like a Spaniard. Guess that’s why I never paid any attention to her. Nikki Glaser had her number in Alec Baldwin’s CC roast.
Her fake is is apt because what she did was laughable, HILARIOUS, actually.
Same here. I had no idea she was doing this. She probably has a very interesting heritage if she would just look into it and own it.
There’s nothing wrong or boring about being white. We just now are trying to celebrate and uplift other heritages that were oppressed in this country. Nobody should take that as a cue to suppress their own heritage and coopt a heritage that seems more exciting for the times. A heritage isn’t a fad, for crying out loud. It’s just that we now can openly demonstrate our delight in non-white heritages, too.
Please be aware that Spain IS a WHITE EUROPEAN country. She’s not pretending to not be white or to be any other type of ethnicity. She’s simply playing up a cultural Spanish identity, not a race or skin color.
Race is a complicated construct. Not that long ago Spanish people were not considered white. Even now there are evidently large pockets in America that do not consider them white. How many times have we seen respected publications refer to a Spanish actor or director as a POC? And if race is to be determined solely by biology, don’t a large number of Spaniards carry North African genes?
To be clear, I’m not arguing they are POC just that it’s complicated. I will say that it’s obvious Hillary wanted to appear more “exotic”. She understood that her whiteness would take on new meaning as a Spanish person and that it would make her more interesting.
She is odd, I was born and lived the start of my life and school years in England but came to America still in school and people treated me differently and were always making fun of my accent and I would have preferred to blend in. It seems glamorous in the grass is greener type of way to be a foreigner (it’s not)but it really is strange to me she didn’t want to be like others who by the sounds of her upbringing were to be proud of and just as interesting from my standpoint. People and their egos can create new versions of themselves but she is so silly, look at Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, their Boston ways are cool. The cucumber thing I really bizarre and seems something a complex type of personality would do, if you know what I mean. One thing for me is when I stay in England for extended times my accents starts to pick up quickly, my mimicking to not stand out or old ways come back when they are deeply ingrained. People can often hear my accent now matter how hard, I have a hard time with the way Americans don’t say the t’s in words such as butter. But I digress, to lie while dating someone like Alec Baldwin is nuts, he’s very famous and people from your past will see your deception and you will be exposed.
@Julie, maybe in the US.
I’ve never heard a European say Spanish people as a whole are not white.
@ Julie
The ‘Spaniards not being white’ trope is largely an American construct from the weird racial stuff there, not something that’s universal
@Miss America Of course I know people from Spain are white, hence my first sentences, where I clearly state she was pretending not to be a “white American” and, instead, “white from Spain,” which is just so…hilariously needy and oddly, uninteresting. Like others on here, I too am good at accents and have fooled actual people from the country I’m coopting into believing I’m from there. But I do that for a laugh, not a lifestyle. The woman has issues. And pathology– psychological ones.
And @Julie, yes, studying whiteness in America is a study in those who sought out how to be affiliated with the oppressor and gain those advantages over others. There are cases that went to the Supreme Court in the early 1900s, where people of different ethnicities and races (Italians, Irish, etc.) sued in order to be classified as white and, hence, no longer “otherized,” but rather dominant and oppressive themselves. Even Indian and and Japanese people have wanted to be a “free white person” in America, but our illustrious Supreme Court was like, Well, you don’t *LOOK* white, so, nah. The United States is founded on the oppression of others and wouldn’t know what to do with itself if, in fact, all *men* were treated equally.
The Washington Post has a HILARIOUS article about this. I just read it and I highly recommend it. Amy Shumer gets the last laugh.
Hilaria is just so dumb. I’m sure she’s very nice, I get that her stepdaughter likes her, etc., but it was so dumb to lie about this. Good for her family that they love Spain. BAD to not call out “Hilaria” when she started the cultural appropriation.
Someone called this inquiry racist. Thoughts?
My thoughts? Need more info. Who said the inquiry was racist? Which inquiry? The Washington Post’s? The one made by the people who went to school with Hilaria/Hilary?
Hilaría pretending to be of Spanish descent in the United States is racist since people like my mom had their Spanish accents beaten out of them by racist teachers in the 1950s and 60s. Baldwin is working her white privileges by pretending to be someone who she doesn’t understand. She may “get” Spanish culture, but she’s cosplaying the identity where people are persecuted for it.
I’m multi ethnic and I don’t get the “exotic” and “boring” descriptors of ethnicities and cultures. Like the name calling and stereotyping needs to cease in all directions. She’s not a boring, she’s a liar!
Live by social media, die by social media. She apparently can’t just live her life, she has to “curate” it.
Seriously. I scrolled though her IG yesterday and I was astonished at just how much she posts and how utterly thirsty she is for attention. I also read that she pays people to make positive comments. It’s sad to me.
Seriously! I don’t even follow her yet every week she seems to be creating some huge drama on Instagram or wherever. She has five young children; you’d think she’d be too busy to be spending that much time on social media ffs but it seems like she’s addicted to the attention/drama.
It’s sad to me, too, Esmom. To create an entirely new history, new family, new culture … that’s really something. She’s kept it up for so long. I wonder if her husband knows and/or if he cares? And what about her real parents? It’s really bizarre, that a person could start something like this and keep it up for so long.
HB’s parents were both born in Massachusetts, her mother is a doctor.
I agree with you, so much. Also, people repeatedly tell me how other nationalities (making a thorough list) accent are bad but mine is ok ?!?!? as if I listen to it thinking ‘oh lucky me’ and not ‘who judge people speaking several languages in such a condescending way’.
The CRAZIEST part is for me is their kids’ Spanish names. She was really committed to the lie!
Maybe she likes the names popular in Latin America and Spanish speaking countries
How is that different from people anywhere in the world giving their kids what some will consider European-sounding first names?
Some who call their daughters Carmen/Valentina/Paloma/etc…. does that mean they are doing something wrong? they might just like how those names sound
Don’t take me wrong, I get the gaps in the story like coming in the US for NYU but she might have been in Spain that year and came to the US to study at NYU; my point is I don’t see what she gained by pretending to be Spanish-American?
From what I read yesterday, Alec had an unrequited crush on Penelope Cruz so Hillary thought it would up her chances with him if she had a similar background.
Pretty East Coast yoga teachers with her real background are ordinary. Pretty East Coast yoga teachers with her fake background are not common.
It had to be about standing out to Alec, then the rest of us.
Is she Spanish-American though? I mean clearly her parents were US born, from the article but what about grandparents? Why have so much of her family gone to live there if they had no connection and why did she grow up speaking Spanish? I know it’s a common second language but I just wonder whether there is more of a connection?
I’m not American but it’s always facinated me how Americans claim their nationality/ancestry. For example, I’ve seen several occasions of Jimmy Fallon claiming to be Irish and talking about all the culturally Irish things his familly does. This sparked my interest after maybe the 4th or 5th time, so I googled it and found an article about his ancestry, demonstrating that his grandparents or great grandparents were Irish.
After even more research, I found that many Americans claim this more distant sort of ancestry and kind of romanticise the culture. Is this not what Hilaria Baldwin is doing?
@WildGrace – the Daily Beast clearly states the following “An obituary for Hilaria’s grandfather on her father’s side stated that he was an American with roots in the country that “pre-dated the American Revolution,” while a wedding announcement indicated that her grandfather’s first wife (and mother of their children) hailed from Nebraska.”
No where in that write up does it state she has Spanish ancestry.
@ wildgrace – I hope I can explain our weird American habit of identifying with the origin of our grandparents or great-grandparents etc. We’re a nation of either immigrants or abducted people (slaves) with no authentic old history in America. Only the indigenous people have a true history here. Therefore, it’s a custom to say we’re “Irish” or “French” or “Italian” or “Greek” or “Indian” etc here because we all come from much longer histories elsewhere and we have cultural differences within our families. Many Americans continue to honor their ancestral heritages through the generations through vestiges of cultural identity and cultural bonds. The reason this is so important for so many Americans is because without it, there are NO TIES to an ancestral past, to an ancestral history. It does not exist here in America. Unless we’re indigenous, we have to honor the place our family originated from or be completely rootless people who came from nowhere. We all came from somewhere, so we honor that. It’s just an American custom to claim to be “Irish” or whatever, no educated American actually thinks they’re an Irish national or whatever. Unfortunately unless someone is well-traveled, they’re probably not aware of how bizarre this sounds to Europeans and people not living in the “New World” (and not indigenous). It is not a claim of nationalism – it’s a claim of heritage. You can safely ignore it as just a weird custom of immigrant-nation life in America. I hope that helps.
@Nan, interesting. Thanks
@ Nan yet in countries like Australia that are even younger (if you go by white colonisation) that’s not a thing. You mention your heritage but you get by fine without having a long history or being particularly enchanted by it.
So I asked my boyfriend who is actually from Spain to listen to her speak in Spanish with no context about the story overall – except for telling him her name, to which his first reaction was “Hilaria isn’t a Spanish name”. Noting he could be wrong on that, he’s convinced she sounds completely Spanish except for the VERY occasional word which he says makes it sound like she’s lived abroad for a while.
So now I don’t know what to think… (but am enjoying the internet sleuthing!)
(When I told him about the comment I’m replying to here and explained the kids’ names, he thought they sounded “much more Spanish than Hilaria”, for what it’s worth.)
Ash- I don’t understand your comment. She has admitted that she’s not Spanish, that she grew up in Boston, so there’s nothing to be confused about. She has been to Spain though growing up, so that’s probably how she learned the accent and language. She lied, pretended she didn’t know English that well (there’s even a video of her trying to find the English word for “cucumber”).
The accent I can understand when she is speaking in Spanish. As a person who speaks three languages, one not as fluent as the other two, I find that using the proper accent helps me to enunciate better and it helps me to stay consistent with the language. What I find to be the craziest part in all this is when she speaks English in a ‘Spanish’ accent. That’s sounds super hilaria-ious to me *I’ll show myself out*
The accent makes sense to me, especially if she did learn to speak Spanish (or become more fluent) in Spain. I was a Spanish major in college and studied abroad in Spain, in Salamanca, and after a few months of living there, when I traveled around in Spain, people would tell me I had a Salamancan accent. And even when I came back to the US, for the first few years, whenever I spoke Spanish it was with a very distinctive Spanish accent.
But like Myra says, its the fake accent while speaking English that adds to the weirdness of this story.
Yeah, that’s what’s weird to me, too, Myra. I’m native English but was raised from age 5 in a French region so half my brain is French and I’m fluent. However, if I haven’t been speaking French for a while, I have to pay more attention to accent, and my French accent is all over the place depending on the day–it’s actually is pretty fluid, and when I travel I’ve been mistaken for Swiss French, France French, German, Spanish, but usually I get “where the heck do you come from?” when I’m speaking to French native speakers because my accent is, well, for whatever reason unique, but rarely sounds Anglophone.
But my English? Never changes, even after spending weeks on weeks in France. I sometimes put in a French word if I forget the English, but that happens super super rarely and only for certain things that I never learned the English word for until I was an adult, like “three-ring binder” and “looseleaf paper”. You know, school-age words. I also sometimes instinctively use French pronunciations for loan words, because it comes faster out of my brain/mouth than the Anglo bastardised pronunciation; I’m sure people love to leap to the “pretentious” thing, but that’s only the kind of crap that comes out of unilingual English mouths.
@Godwina the bastardised french words get me every time. How did anyone get leftenant from lieutenant? 🙂 I also end up giggling when I hear certain french words/phrases pronounced funnily in movies/tv shows. “Deux” pronounced as “dex”. I will drop dead in a fit of laughter though if I ever hear a french person speak french words in an english accent or pretended not to know the french word for cucumber (which is what Hilaria did).
FWIW, I’ve been told by Spaniards that my accent when I speak Spanish is very good. I am a white Polish-American girl from the Northeast US with no Spanish heritage. I had a Spanish teacher who is from Spain and probably picked up the accent from him.
(I’ve also been told by Poles that the little Polish that I can speak is with a good accent too. Some people are just good with accents maybe?)
I was reading that some Spanish people thought her accent was very authentic but her Spanish, they said she only spoke in the present tense not past or future …therefore not like a real native speaker of Spanish…which she has claimed.
The fact that she’s just a regular white person from Boston that can speak a second language so well …it’s pretty cool. I don’t know why she couldn’t just stick with the truth.
Born and raised in US and live my entire life here. Parents taught me their native language and we only spoke that in our home growing up. I had to take ESL classes in grade school. Visited my parent’s homeland many times and still speak the language. I also speak Spanish. People comment on how well I articulate words (since I had to articulate for my parents so they could learn to pronounce words) and conclude my accent is from my NY state upbringing. The only people who have been able to correctly guess I grew up speaking another language were my professors in college and that was because, as they all said, was do to how I pronounced with clear articulation and very phonetically. And English is not phonetic when compared with other languages.
I could not find videos of her speaking Spanish, did you find them easily?
Hilaria is a Spanish name. Not common at all nowadays (at least in Spain; can’t speak for Latin America), but definitely Spanish. There’s a night news anchor named Hilario (Hilario Pino), which is the male version in our language.
Perhaps she genuinely gave birth to the entire cast of Dora the Explora.
Not for me. Other than « carmen » all her kids names are Current popular names. Using Spanish names is not really « out there . » I mean two of my favourite french celebrities both named their daughters names that seem very Vietnamese or Cantonese with no connection, names are kind of a free for all right now but Spanish names have always been used by anglos, pretty sure that’s where we got Vanessa, Jessica, and Alicia. Alec’s other kid’s name is “Ireland “ so Spanish origin names aren’t exciting for that family. On the other hand pretending to be an ESL level speaker and have a strong accent in your own language and have not known pop culture, that’s really something. Even Rachel Dolezal didn’t have an accent to that level.
What I first thought of is was this to be a popular yoga teacher? Like do people prefer foreign yoga teachers? I’m trying to figure out a logical motivation. Wonder if we will see “Her” on SNL! Hopefully by Cécily strong !
Just to clarify that Jessica was first recorded in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and Vanessa was invented by Irish author Jonathan Swift – a covert nickname for his lover Esther Van Something (hence Van-Essa).
But I agree with you on the popularity of “borrowing” names from other cultures has a long history in the US and Canada especially. Maybe because, as someone else noted upthread, we are a often a hodgepodge of backgrounds with only a tenuous connection to a substantial sense of history.
post in the wrong area
Her phenotype is unmistakably not Irish or Scandinavian. She might have made up a convenient background out of opportunism but her remote ethnical background is definitely Iberian, Greek and / or Italian.
Every public persona is built on make believe at some point, so why should she be any different anyways?
Her phenotype is meaningless though when her family background going back hundreds of years is in America. That sounds like those people who claim they’re Irish because their family came from there in the 1800s. Having some ‘irish’ DNA does not an Irish person make, though at least Hilaria has been to Spain I guess.
In that first picture, she looks Spanish/ Latina despite having no Spanish heritage. So she must be tanning away and dyeing her hair constantly to look Spanish. Her parents and her children are blonde.
You are so right! Thank you .
@Nan, I read your explanation of this fascination with a heritage that the Americans have and have a question for you (or anyone who wants to chime in) – why do you think Americans aren’t satisfied with being just that, Americans? There’s plenty of cultural and historical heritage that the country have accumulated in the few hundred years for the people not to feel like they need to find it somewhere else. It’s not like nothing had happened to the country and there’s not much to be proud of. I’m not from the US originally and I’ve always found it amusing how quick the people are to start listing their parents’ and grandparents’ nationalities as if being an American means nothing.
I have the kind of background Hilaria does on her father’s side……ancestors came here before the Revolution. Both of my parents are from small cities in the South, though they moved to the Northeast and raised us there. We aren’t Mayflower babies, just descended from some of the many people who came here in the 17th and 18th centuries, for economic reasons or due to indentured servitude, etc., and drifted South. It has never bothered me, in fact I think it’s cool that some relatives fought in the Revolution. But I am curious to know more about exactly why they came and from where. So I guess that’s what 23 And Me is for.
Those eyebrows have been trying to tell us lol
So sick of eyebrows like this. It’s all over Montreal especially anglos and quebeckers and Arab and Indian women like these ; If you’re indicating Europeans have held back, thank god I still have some hope in women kind. More is not more ladies! Especially when it looks completely unnatural
Seriously, what is the procedure to get them to look so bizarre?
It’s botox and threads pulled through the skin to lift up the brows. It looks really horrible when they get it done. I’d never have any foreign object put into me unless absolutely necessary. Bodies try to get rid of them and respond with inflammation and scarring.
The tragedy of the eyebrows is not being discussed enough in all of this.
😉
Haha! I blame Cara Delavigne (however she spells it?) who had a fierce brow game unlike everyone else at the time, now others try but Cara’s were natural and suited her face. It’s the same with J-Lo and butts, her’s suited her as it was natural but then others bought bigger bottoms and it never looks normal.
Glad I’m not the only one who noticed that!
Thank you. The eyebrows are a crime and the over-microbladed caterpillar eyebrows have got to stop.
This is….bizarre lol.
Can we just all start calling her Hilarious Baldwin now? I admit that’s been my name for her for a while. Or perhaps Sedienta Baldwin is a better fit.
How do these high profile people think they can get away with things like this post internet age?
It’s a good laugh though…
That’s what I thought; you really can’t get away with much in the internet age, people!
I don’t understand these people that came out and said they went to school with her and said she was lovely, where were they all these years?
People have been saying this for years, it just picked up traction and went viral this weekend.
I ran into these comments on YouTube, dating back to 2012/2013. It is just that they were either ignored or told off as being trolls.
I found her more interesting under the fake persona. Wait does Alec know about this? All I envision is a skit on SNL where Melania has faked her persona as well and the family finds out….
Why do you find her more interesting as someone from Spain & the USA?
I might be giving her the benefit of the doubt but why would she lie about where is from? why would anyone even consider her “Exotic” because of Spain? I hate the “exotic” adjective because it is usually coded in prejudice especially when applied to people.
I go get the gaps in her story; she said her family called her Hilaria vs other people call her Hilary; She went with the one she prefers, that’s her business! I think the accent might be understandable especially for those who speak many languages….I also even understand forgetting some words in one language.
Because to live a lie is fascinating from a psychological point of view and let’s also the lengths she went to. And I don’t think it’s only her business if she is living a lie. It is still A LIE. There may be some other deep seeded issues there as well.
@Seraphina — why do you care? or why should you care? or why would anyone care about the life of a complete stranger? how does she affect your life exactly?
I get the gossips aspect of all of this and the distraction it might provide to some, why should care if she has about “There may be some other deep seeded issues there as well.” ?
To each their own I guess
But apparently her family doesn’t call her Hilaria. The original tweet had a video of her mom giving an interview where she calls her brother “Jeremy” easily and smoothly and hesitates and stumbles over calling her Hilaria.
VS, not sure why you are grilling Seraphina so harshly, this is gossip gold. And I agree that it takes some deep seeded issues to live a lie about your identity and background like that.
@ VS – First I would like to thank Esmom, THANK YOU for that. Exactly what you said and I will add this: because I had to grown up in this country – always standing out and being ridiculed and teased for speaking the language of my parents. Because I had to grow up being told to get back on the boat that brought me here. Because I had to grow up in a society that had me change my VERY ethnic name in grade school. Because I still get told I don’t “look American” or my favorite “what are you”.
Because I still get stares when I speak to my cousins and my children in the language I was taught as a child. So VS, to hear a white woman falsified her “ethnicity” and tweaked her name is mind baffling to me and an insulting for those of us who had grown up in a country that practiced racial and ethnic intolerance and is still practiced in this country.
She lied and said she first came to the US at age 19 after growing up in Spain which is a straight up bizarre lie. It’s one thing to be fluent in Spanish and like Spanish names for your kids, but pretending to be a culture you are not is offensive, especially when you are speaking English with a fake Spanish accent. None of this is ok. It would be 100% worse if she pretended to be indigenous or black but acting like you don’t know the English word for cucumber when you grew up in Boston and adopting a Spanish persona once your rich parents buy a retirement home in Spain is white rich girl privilege just the same.
@serafina…. you stated it better than me in terms of what she has done.
@Esmon…….. why is asking questions considered harsh? I said I get the gossip aspect of it; but that someone would consider that this is somehow correlated to deep issues, then I ask myself questions: why would anyone even care about a complete stranger issues? how does that affect the OP’s life at all?
If someone says she took an opportunity from someone else, i could understand; but which opportunity did she exactly get or could she get by lying about her background?
@Seraphina — I get that but that isn’t Hilaria’s fault. I don’t know if you live in the US or if you do, where in the US, you live but racism, xenophobia, ignorance exist even in NYC/SF/Boston which I consider to be some of the most diverse, educated and open cities in the US…
My point is I get the gossipy nature of all of this, insulting? once again if she had taken opportunities from someone else like Dolezal did, yes that’s reprehensible but here what opp did she get? marrying Alec?
Anyway as I said below, there are gaps, it looks like she played with some details, I guess I am surprised by how widespread this has become.
VS, I guess I felt it was harsh to single out one person to grill them about why they care about this story because this is a gossip blog and we choose to come here to discuss it. We care about stuff like this for a variety of reasons. If you don’t care about it you can scroll on by.
She is most certainly an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in the making. What exactly does it take to live such a lie in all its encompassing glory? The range is deep and wide from sad to criminal.
@VS, I was born in the US and have lived my entire life in this country – my parents’ adopted homeland. I am not here to defend or criticize any parts of this country in how it treats others due to xenophobia, which is EVERYWHERE – not only in the US. But I digress.
You came across harsh and interrogative in your line of questioning and this is a gossip blog. These people open their lives up to scrutiny once they agree to step into public life. And yes, that means we get to gossip about the lack of judgement on her part pretending to be something she is not. We scrutinize all these people and she is no different. And her actions cross boundaries on many levels. I enjoy this site for the many diverse points of view and from so much that I learn. And my point of view, from my lens in which I view the world and my experiences, have rendered the judgment that there is something off here and she is a con artist.
I think you’re missing the point, she is a native born America, raised in Boston but she uses a Spanish accent when speaking English – this is something she apparently started doing to create this persona of Hilaria the yoga instructor & IG influencer from Spain. What’s offensive isn’t just her lies about who she is to make herself seem more interesting or “exotic,” it’s that she also decided to affect a Spanish accent when speaking English to facilitate this lie. Nobody would bat an eyelash if she worked on her English diction to remove her Boston accent & have a more generic accent – many people lose their regional accents but they still speak w/a generic American one.
Nobody cares that she speaks Spanish with a Spanish accent, being able to do so shows she likely learned to speak the language by native speakers and immersion.
Affecting a foreign accent to speak English as she does, especially when coupled with the false narrative she’s created about her roots & upbringing is what people are, rightfully, dragging her about.
@VS. Why should you care what people care about?
You sought out a story about this topic and have been trying to tamp down discussion. You are doing A LOT right now.
Hillary is a culture vulture, appropriating to boost her ego. Not someone who just appreciates Spanish culture. When Gwyneth Paltrow, who also spent time in Spain and speaks Spanish fluently, can be more respectful, you know you f*ked up.
People that comfortable with lying are not just keeping that to one part of their life.
@VS – I don’t understand why you’re going after Seraphina for her comment. She has a totally legitimate reason to question the motivation of a celebrity influencer, married to a famous actor, to falsify her background. “Hilaria” is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and there has to be a psychological quirk that caused her to take on a false persona. This isn’t about saying “I’m right and you’re wrong”, it’s about digging into the reason(s) why Hilaria lied.
@Jaded — I am not going after her. I am just amazed by how blown this story has become and how much people care about it. This is not limited to CB. This story was everywhere and trending on Twitter, I found that quite funny
I don’t even think there is a right or wrong here. As I have acknowledged I get the gossip aspect; I guess I didn’t react like most because she didn’t take an opportunity from someone else unlike Dolezal….I am honestly missing why people are so outraged
I think it’s a mix of people who are outraged and people who are just enjoying some gossip. I’ve been reading the viewpoints about people who have been treated negatively because of their accents being put off that this wealthy American women faked an accent to seem more interesting and it’s something I’m taking on board because originally I was more in the fluffy gossip side.
I do find it off-putting that she’s shown up on NBC shows and put out a defense that journalists got it wrong when she was the one who lied about where she was born. Just take the L and let it blow over. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It’s not the end of the world. I really didn’t like Alec weighing in because he’s a notorious bully.
If she was just letting people believe she was Soanish and liked the name Hilaria fair enough, but saying she gets mistaken for her children’s nanny because shes Spanish? People with dual heritage children have to suffer that in real life, yet she has fetishised a prejudice. Shes also pandered to racists who think white people have to pretend to be immigrants to get work. You only need to look at the Daily Mail comments to see that.
I would think Alec found out when he met his all white in laws. She may have kept the pretense but I doubt her family would have played along. That is one big ruse right?
Ummm Spanish people can be as white as anyone, that wouldn’t mean anything.
I find her much more interesting NOW. The thought process, keeping it straight, trying to be Instagram famous with this looking over her shoulder.
This is bad. And I wonder if Alec even knew. He sort of has no interest in her besides she babies him. Obviously loves sex. He’s proud of her body. And loves that he doesn’t have to ‘daddy’. This is such a huge scam.
You don’t know that. How dismissive. He said Hilaria comes everywhere with him when he travels for work and brings the children. I do believe he loves her. He indulges her, for sure.
It’s interesting in that pop culture interview how she answers. She dances around really answering. She said she came here at 19. I’m assuming referrinng to New York City. The interviewer misunderstood and assumed it was to the country for the first time. She then danced around that question by saying present tense her parents are in Majorca. And then danced around answering the truth again when asked another question and saying generically she knew nothing about pop culture. You could see she never really answered the direct questions, which would have entailed her saying then: Oh, no. I grew up in America. So answering inn a misleading and evasive way without ever stating there she was born in Majorca.
I feel sorry for her in a way. Every one of her classmates that posted something on twitter says she was very kind. Her stepdaughter Ireland has come out singing he rpraises as a good person, who has been very good to her and her father and is a great mother. She’s defending her, while not stating that it’s a lie.
So if your stepdaughter really likes you and approves of you with her father, I accept that she is a good person, and just find it kind of sad that Hilary/Hilaria felt the need to spin her background. Vacationing summers in Spain and then having parents and a sibling move there when she’s an adult nine years ago is not the same as the background she’s created. Again, I find it weird, and looking at it from a psychological standpoint, trying to figure her out is interesting.
I’m guessing her “embellishment” started when she was a yoga teacher. I can attest it’s a competitive industry, and Euro teachers are more sought after. I’m thinking it was a stage persona – remember Alec fell in love w his “yoga teacher”, a bit of a character of a real person
Someone on Twitter posted that she was their yoga teacher and that one day she just decided she was going to be called Hilaria and since she was a great yoga teacher no one really questioned it. Obviously they didn’t know how far she would go.
It’s surreal… Do Americans really find Europeans (Spanish people, among others) “exotic”?
And to conflate Spain (a colonial power) with Latin America (the colonized) strikes me as a bit, I don’t know, wrong?
She’s an idiot, basically. Did he truly fall for it or is he just going along with the story?
I don’t find them exotic, no. But I don’t know. I don’t think I’m normal for an American. I don’t even know what that means, it reminds me of a bird? I used to have a friend who would describe herself as an ‘exotic beauty” in her personal ads. She was Jewish. American born. Now that I’m thinking about this, you could write quite a black comedy about this stuff right?
It’s from the Greek word “eksōtikós”, stranger/foreign/outsider.
It’s a very versatile word, apparently. You’re right, it could be the start of a dark comedy…
I’m interested in anyone from outside my area, due to their unique perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences.
Unfortunately, Hilaria does not fall under that category, as I am ALSO from Massachusetts.
@Esme Thank you! I was thinking this myself. I hardly look upon the Spanish as poor, exotic or whatever. They simply annihilated the people in Latin America, so I don’t know if that whole appropriating culture thing works here. To me the situation is more like an American pretending to be British to be ‘fancier’ or something.
I’m not saying that it’s not deeply weird or wrong, just that the power balance isn’t the same. I live in Mexico and people of European descent are definitely higher up and privileged by right of birth and skin colour. They might be discriminated against in the US, but they certainly aren’t anywhere else as far as I’m aware.
But from the OP it seems like Hillary herself was exploiting the potential Spanish/Latin American ambiguous perception to get more covers. I think it’s worse than simply pretending to be Spanish to feel “fancier”.
I asked the question because I’m European, and historically it’s been us Europeans who went around labelling other people “exotic” (not that it was a good thing, it’s a racist and otherising practice) – I’m just fascinated by the fact that Americans (USA) apply the label to us nowadays.
Exactly Esme, ambiguous perception is right.
Spain is in Europe, for us southamericans Spain is the same as saying France/Portugal,etc, I’ve lived in Spain, and believe me, they dont really like when people asume that because they speak spanish they are “latinos”, and they are right they are europeans.
I even had a friend who was half spanish, half french, and when he studied in the US whenever he mentioned he was from Spain, people would assume oh mexican! (lol), so he started saying he was french (which he was of course, but he was raised in Spain so…)
I think many average white Americans find anyone who isn’t a second+ generation American to be a bit “exotic,” because we assume that by coming from a specific country, they have an actual unique, non-diluted “culture,” that has its own unique language, customs, food, holidays, architecture, religion, etc. As opposed to America which is a relatively new country and such a melting pot that not many people even know what their heritage is, and if they do they’re likely to be a combination of many different things (I am Polish, English, Dutch, German, Irish, for example and my ancestors immigrated generations ago and then tried very hard to assimilate, become “American,” and learn English. So I don’t have any very old family traditions that are unique to any of those countries. I have generic “American traditions” like fireworks on the 4th of July, Santa Claus at Christmas, watching the ball drop on New Years, the Easter bunny at Easter.) And there is no real, historical, unique “American” food, or language, or architecture, or religion, or culture. There is no United States ancient history or medieval history. No ruins or monuments or very old cathedrals. Especially for people who live in states that weren’t even founded until the 1850s or later. (I know that there is Native American ancient history and monuments, but I’m speaking specifically about the United States as a country.)
So we feel very generic and lacking in history or culture. Our “culture” is basically just a hodge podge of bastardized traditions from the various countries our ancestors came from all mixed up, and then capitalism and materialism. Spanish people, for example, are thought to be “exotic,” even if they are white Western Europeans, because they live in Spain, in a Spanish house, with Spanish relatives and Spanish friends, and they speak Spanish and go to Spanish places and eat Spanish food and follow centuries-old Spanish traditions. I think most average white Americans see all the various other “old world” countries as each being very special and unique, full of old, historical buildings, where the people are quite homogenous. As in they expect Spain to be full of only Spanish-born, Spanish-speaking people who are descended from Spanish-born people, who have been passing on special, unchanging, Spanish recipes and rituals and traditions for centuries. And in that way, they are “exotic,” because they’re just SO SPANISH. (or french or British or Greek or Italian or whatever.) Many Americans don’t consider that a Spanish citizen may be an immigrant from Greece, who speaks English a lot for work, and lives in a modern high-rise apartment, and who watches American TV shows and listens to Korean boy bands.
Amy too I think you nailed it.
I can’t help noticing how her eyes move from side to side as she talks about her “true” story on this clip. That is generally considered an indication that the speaker is lying or distorting the truth. Not saying she is, but it’s pretty constant and extreme here, and does make her look like she’s playing with facts. Okay, lying.
Your take makes me miss the eyes for lies website. I wonder if she is still active.
Loved her takes on EVERYTHING.
@ariel, she is still semi-active. She has stepped back a bit because she was so disturbed by what she saw in the political arena. She would post political analysis quite a bit, and as you can imagine, was attacked quite viciously. She posts on her Facebook account under her real name, Renee Ellory, and occasionally the website.
Thanks! I will look on the website.
Facebook is a different kind of evil, can’t go there.
All evidence in, it does sound like she fabricated a lot of her origin story. But don’t put any stock in the pseudo-science of kinesics (reading body language), which is as iffy as graphology, phrenology, and polygraphs in terms of accurate reads on actual human characteristics. Saying definitely someone is lying because they look or act a certain way is about as helpful as saying a rape didn’t happen because the victim is behaving (or not behaving) a certain expected way. Different people behave differently under different circumstances.
I’m not saying she’s not lying – something for sure is up with this story – but the eyes moving isn’t a sure sign. I move my eyes all over the place when I speak and I’m not lying, lol.
I would think that she was reading it directly off of a card or something.
I noticed the same thing! She’s lying.
Oh my GOD. I saw her trending on Twitter but didn’t have the time or interest to look into why. Holy moly.
I’m both puzzled and amused by this. It’s such a bizarre and random lie. Celebrities! They’re just… weird.
She was my brother and sis-in-law’s yoga teacher pre-Alec. They said she never had a Spanish accent and also was named Hilary. LMAO. This was so enjoyable for us yesterday.
I’m enjoying it too! Fun fact, Hillary is the one person who has ever blocked me on Twitter, lol.
What did you say?!
Well this is a change,they usually try to white wash their ‘exotic’ background not give it more legs. eg Jennifer Aniston,Charlie Sheen
THIS.
People I presume used to whitewash their background because they were being discriminated against due to their race. People were more likely to invite an all American white girl next door to an audition than than someone with a Greek name on her resume. Thats what makes it offensive. She was a white girl from a priveleged wealthy background who never had to change her name to get a job before she was even seen, and as a PP said didnt have anyone making fun of her accent yet she decided to pretend to be Spanish for YEARS! It smacks of poverty porn. Like being poor is so romantic, until you have to live it.
Why is Spanish equivalent to being poor or not white? Have you ever been there? I spent all my summers there as a child and most Americans would have envied the standard of living I saw there. By the way not all Latin Americans are poor. Some live very well.
Echoing SMS…and many others…I am surprised by these misconceptions about Spanish heritage and standards of living. I think you could make all of this up (or exaggerate or whatever) for the “exotic” factor, if that’s what you’re going for. But Spain is not an underprivileged nation. European conquerers of indigenous peoples.
With that said, I find this story fascinating on so many levels. Why did she change her backstory? Why was she not outed sooner (or why did the “outing” not turn into a legit story sooner) when she is so eager to keep the world in her business?
I’m not judging her one way or the other, just really makes me curious.
I don’t understand why someone would lie about this…
You guys know that that are white people in Spain right ?? And Spain is in Europe. Btw even in latin american countries white people exist. But yeah looks like she was lying, but for what tho ? How long she expected her lie would go on. Did he knew about her background ? Or she lied to him as well
That’s not the issue here. Most commenters here know there are white people in LATAM and that Spaniards are white. This is about her choosing the bits and pieces immigrants are mocked for, and appropriating them just to be “different”. Her celebrity and fame protected her form those attacks and setbacks that come from not being White and having an accent.
How many Spanish speaking actors are mocked and criticized for their accents? Or told to white wash themselves a bit? I bet Hillary isn’t even a real brunette.
You can admire a country’s culture and language without appropriating it.
I’ve vacationed and lived in the US, I pass for a white American and I sound like one yet I’d never dream of claiming to be one.
I have a very generic American accent (thank you, movies) and English is my second language. I have never been mocked for my accent or grammar, but I’ve seen plenty of immigrants attacked, mocked and belittled for their accents and English, so for her to put up this show and “otherizing” herself is infuriating – she mocked immigrants, she mocked Spaniards and she basically decided to appropriate a different culture as her own (she raises her kids as Spaniards! and she isn’t one).
Everyone is going after her because she’s obviously a pathological liar and should see a therapist, but Alec Baldwin must have known. When you marry someone and have children with them, you see government issued documentation. Did he never meet her very non-Spanish family?
Spain is a European country and most of the population is white. It has a long history, and resulting wealth and culture, from a long history of colonalisation. I don’t think talking about cultural appropriation is appropriate here, as it lacks the context of exploitation.
For the same reason I am also not a fan of the dolezal comparison. It is only similar if you remove the context which made that case so infuriating.
Hilaria is ridiculous, of course.
I am Argentinian – I know.
This is cultural appropriation, I don’t care if Spain used to be a colonizing Empire in most of Latin America and, just as other Imperial Monarchies, carried out genocides on foreign land.
Hillary exploited a culture and a language to seem, what? Exotic? Different? More special than her own ancestry? She literally took everything most foreigners are mocked and belittled for, just to be “different” all while being protected by her whiteness and celebrity. She put on a fake SPANISH accent while speaking in English in order to lie. If you can’t see that as cultural appropriation…
Except she is the citizen of and spends most of her time in a racist country that views all Hispanic accents as suspiciously foreign and illegal. There are people here who believe Puerto Ricans are immigrants and likely illegal at that.
In the grand scheme of things, Spanish folks are mostly white, yes. But in terms of faking Spanish foreign origins here in America, she absolutely othered herself for attention and appropriated a culture and marginalization that wasn’t hers, especially to do it as a woman.
Also, you cannot ignore that when many Americans hear a Spanish accent, even if the English is flawless, they act like they can’t understand or that the speaker must be dumb, or act like the speaker isn’t speaking English or is “too lazy” to learn English.
It’s foolish to pretend that white Hispanics do not face discrimination and otherism for their perceived foreignness.
Interesting. I am German (living in Britain, so I have experience being mocked for my accent as well), and if someone would pretend the same with a German heritage, I would find it amusing and ridiculous not infuriating.
I honestly think that her pretending to be Spanish and Spanish speaking really muddles the water, because a lot of US Americans would probably not make a distinction between Spanish and Latin X people which complicates this.
However… Having an accent from a western European country (associated with western European heritage) is a fundamentally different experience than many other people with accents have. Cause our accent is not automatically associated by many people with a lack of wealth, culture, education and privilege.
Cultural appropriation becomes a thing in my understanding, not because people take and adapt from other cultures, but because it is acknowledged that some cultures and their products only get positive attention, acknowledgement and respect when presented through a white western lense. And this is simply not the case here.
@pilot, the most polite way I can address your further comments is to say that as you aren’t American nor are you living in America, you are lacking proper context to come to the conclusion you have.
Many comments here explain it but you seem to be insistent on contextualizing it through your own experience and that’s not going to give you the context you need.
@DS9 I have lived in the US previously actually. My point was to offer some arguments regarding cultural appropriation and the problem that comes with US Americans having the tendency to think of the rest of the world apart from Canada as slightly impoverished backwaters.
Pilot – they think Canadians are slightly impoverished and backwards, too 😉
@Anners Haha, my bad!
@pilot you are so generous to think that most Americans think of Canada at all 😂 Please corral a bunch of people from the Bible Belt on the street and ask them to point out Canada on a map.
@Chaine Haha! Admittedly, my experience might have been clouded by living in Berkeley where Canada tended to be considered as the Holy Land and possible escape route from Trump.
@Pilot – I’m Canadian and have been astonished at the lack of knowledge or respect Canada gets from Americans. I’ve had thing said to me by Americans in Canada like “Oh, let me pay for that in real money” when I went to pay for my dinner tab. Then there was the time when, in south Florida, I met some locals who said I had a “funny accent” and asked where I was from. When I said “Toronto” they didn’t know where that was. There was a great show on TV here called “Talking to Americans” with Rick Mercer. He would ask people on the streets in America things like “Would you sign this petition to stop hunters from shooting polar bears on the streets of Ottawa?” and they believed him. He convinced one guy that our parliament buildings were made of ice. That’s the level of stupidity many Americans suffer from.
I don’t see this as cultural appropriation at all. It’s like Jacqueline Onassis who was mostly Irish/British but played up her very remote French heritage. It’s weird but saying she’s trying to present as a poor Latina suffering from discrimination says more about the ignorance of those who can’t tell the difference between a Spaniard and a Latin American.
@SMS – Yeah, the cultural appropriation thing is nonsense. I get to a certain degree why people are upset by this if it is about assuming an identity which is (falsely!) considered to be ‘other’ and ‘exotic’. However, adopting a fake accent does not mean cultural appropriation is happening in the usual sense.
Complaining about cultural appropriation when it comes to a white western culture is ridiculous in my opinion.
And yeah, you see the conflation of Spain and Latin countries and the systemic racism people experience due to their respective nationality all over this comment section which is just wrong.
Wow, this really turned into a let’s hate on (U.S.) Americans thing…Not all of us are ignorant a**holes, but thanks for the generalizations. Sheesh!
It is a form of cultural appropriation, but more along the lines of impersonating an Italian count or German heiress or something, more like Anna Delvey, not a Rachel Dolezal, who pretended to be an whole other race. She is a white American woman who decide another white culture was more interesting than her own because she felt it would open more doors for her. The thing is she comes from a very privileged background already , so it’s just weird. There are always these types out there.
@ L4frimaire – I agree
Aren’t you naive @pilot (or are you pretending to be)? You made several comments on this thread about your lack of understanding for what people are explaining as cultural appropriation, but you apparently talk in the name of all Europeans and their experiences. No, we are not all treated the same, not even in Europe, even though we would be all considered white. We, mediterranean, south Europeans are looked differently and treated differently as soon as we leave our countries.. then we are very fast reminded that we are not “that white”. I would know it, I live in your country for more than ten years now. So take your head out of your ass and start looking around for how other people go through life and the challenges they have, that apparently you don’t because you’re the right “kind of white”.
@Jaded, that segment by Rick Mercer was one of the best things I’d ever seen. There was a compilation of those clips on YT that I watched for the first time ten years ago, which is how I found out about the existence of Mike Huckabee for the first time in my life, because Rick Mercer managed to get to him too.
Ever since then, any time Mike Huckabee winds up on the news, all I can think about is how he’s the one who congratulated Canada on preserving our national igloo.
Maybe he’s stupid!
some men just genuinely don’t care to look deeper than they have to and he’s obviously somewhat narcissistic so that would contribute as well
I think he’s a major d**che!
Funny how the white elites hate immigrants yet they want to play one to seem more desirable and exotic? GTFO. I’m not a Spaniard but I am Latina and she definitely was playing up that “Latina bombshell” stereotype. So exhausting and annoying.
I agree. Yet we, the real ones, are otherized and mocked just for existing.
That must drive you crazy Ostone. Appropriating another culture as your own is despicable. My mother was born and raised in Mexico of Canadian parents, and I lived and worked in Mexico for several years. I learned the language and admired the culture, but would never have assumed a false name (my name is Valerie and my Mexican colleagues called me “Valeria” just as a joke) or tell everyone my mother is Mexican without noting that she doesn’t have a drop of Mexican blood in her. Shame on Hillary.
@Jaded Your mother IS Mexican. She was born AND raised there. She is…wait for it…a Mexican Latina. No disclaimer is necessary.
Just because she may not be “brown” or Mestiza doesn’t mean she can’t claim the culture she was raised in and born in as her own. No need to mention the “lack of Mexican blood” which is what exactly?
Culture and nationality aren’t exclusive to a particular race. Otherwise, this is the same as saying that all children of immigrants are not and should never claim to be “American” if they were born and raised here in the US — without having “a drop” of “American” blood from their birth parents.
Which, again, is what exactly? Native American? “White gringo” blood?
@Genessee, various nations have different definitions of what gives one an ethnic, cultural, or national identity. And self identification counts for quite a bit within reason. Basing assumptions about inclusion based on one nation’s interpretation a fool’s errand.
I’d assume Jades has a better understanding of her mother’s citizenship, nationality, ethnicity and relationship to the culture around her than most.
This woman used a photo from the D&C appt for her miscarriage as sponcon on Instagram. Anything for attention. She’s awful and needs serious therapy, as do the people doing the most to defend her actions.
Did anyone see Amy Schumer’s now deleted post on Instagram that said “I get it. I went to Spain a couple times and loved it too.”?
It was posted last night. I think it’s truly bizarre to get caught up in a lie like this.. ESPECIALLY when Hilaria is in the public eye—but I feel like Amy is bullying her a little bit? I don’t know. I’m torn. Lying about your heritage isn’t cool at all but Amy fueling the fire is going to send a lot of mean people Hilaria’s way. Does she deserve to be bullied? Probably not right? Truly want to know what people think on this one.
Amy was being Amy. She’s a comic.
You’re conflating consequences with bullying. Of course people are going to make fun of her over this. Consequences of being caught living a lie.
Well said.
Bullying and experiencing consequences are NOT the same thing.
And both of Amy’s posts were funny.
Yep. All actions have consequences. What did HILARY want people to do? Say, “there there it’s ok for lying bean?” This isn’t bullying but it’s comic gold. I doubt SNL will parody it though
Bullied? She’s being rightly criticized for faking a marginalized persona.
And she ought to be lucky that all Amy said after Hilaria manufactured and milked faux outrage over the “body shaming” that never was.
Amy had a moment of schadenfreude and I’m not the least bit mad.
Ok I agree with that. Sometimes rightly criticized can turn into bullying though. Not Amy necessarily. People do hide behind social media and really attack other people which is indeed, bullying. And Ireland defending Hilaria leading to people putting up pig emojis? You see where I’m going with this? Kind of becomes a mean sh*t-storm.
Personally? I think this is strange and she may need some professional help. She tangled herself in a web of cultural lies which is pretty bizarre.
I think Hilaria deserves to be given a bit of a hard time. People who naturally have the accent are given a much harder time about it than a white girl. It’s not seen as “sexy”
— misread your comment.
I thought that was the funniest thing to come from Amy in years!
I went to look for it. Was disappointed it’s not still there.
Considering that Hilaria falsely accused her of body shaming for attention, Amy’s post was pretty benign. And really she was correct because essentially Hilaria decided to be Spanish after visiting the country.
@FHMom — No amy is not being amy because sometimes she hides behind some big words when she is the center of the joke………
Agreed with everyone else on this thread – consequences is not bullying – no one is tagging her on these posts. Which means she’s not seeing them directly. It’s as if you get caught in a lie and other people discuss and laugh about it without you. Bullying would be direct and into the person’s face/inbox. If all she is getting as backlash is jokes — well she’s getting off easy.
I was looking for that Amy post this morning. Too bad she deleted it. If you scroll through “Hilaria’s” Instagram you would probably come to the conclusion that she may actually love all this attention. Women needs help.
Also read she dyes her light colored hair dark to look more Spanish. Always thought her frantically churning out babies was a bit bizarre and another way to get attention. Very weird story.
Amy deleted it, but you can still see the post on the commentsbycelebs account.
The dying her hair part is just weird to me too. Sofia Vergara was asked to do that when she was starting out in North America as well, and she’s a blonde originally. So much of this whole story says a lot about how we view people of other cultures and ethnicities too, lol.
Hillary is a liar, she is the perpetrator of her situation, she is no victim, and she certainly is not being bullied by Amy Schumer. When you do something as gross and pathetic as Hillary has, getting very gently made fun of by a comedienne is getting off easy.
I knew her when we were both competing in college ballroom competitions. She went by Hillary Hayward Thomas.
@wendybird, I find this to be so interesting. Did you make the connection between Hilaria Baldwin and Hillary Hayward Thomas? It just astonishes me that she thought she could completely fabricate her background in the age of the Internet.
@megs283 It was easy to make the connection as soon as she started showing up in photos with Alec. She looked exactly the same as she did in college. I figured it was an affection. You can still find her old stats and old name on dancesportinfo.net
I saw this somewhere too-that she was a competitive ballroom dancer. Although I don’t think that this is something that she ever talks about at all-maybe because then it would be obvious that she “became” Spanish.
Those eyebrows are the most unfortunate part of this situation.
But they’re Spanish, No? Painted by Picasso?
Hahah considering the latest restoration works coming out of Spain, I would not be surprised if they were done by a true Spanish art-eeest!
No one ever mentioned if she has citizenship or a passport (Spain) – that would help clear things up too. I can understand having perfect Spanish dialect if she spent time there as a child but it’s the accent while speaking English that’s bizarre since it’s not her second language.
She doesn’t. She is not from Spain, nor is her family going back many generations. Her parents took them on vacation and then retired there. It’s a bizarre, elaborate lie.
Got it! I just meant that if she spent considerable time there growing up as she says she did wouldn’t she be entitled to dual citizenship as a resident (I don’t know the laws on which countries allow dual) …?
@JD, usually you would have to spend a significant majority of your time in a country to be able to get citizenship.
I think that certain countries will give the children of those who emigrated dual citizenship. Also, my cousins were born in Germany, but they were not given German citizenship just because they were born there. They retained the citizenship of their parents.
If she vacationed there, no. She would need to have attended Spanish school and graduated with a diploma.
As an adult, she would have needed to spend considerable time there working in Spain, which doesn’t sound true either.
I would like to hear her speak Spanish now. I would hope she’s fluent after entertaining this lie for so long.
Seraphina, Yes my dad was born in a northern European country and came here during WWII. He eventually got dual citizenship in the 90s, although it involved a lot of bureaucratic red tape. As his daughter, I am apparently also entitled to dual citizenship if I choose even though I was born in the US. And believe me when I was panicking that Trump might be re-elected I had been fantasizing about it a lot. I still do, tbh. Life seems simpler there than in the US.
@JD in order to qualify for Spanish citizenship, you must reside in Spain for a minimum of at least 7 years and much of that time needs to be spent within Spain – like 9 months out of the year (at least for a regular visa).
Source: my sibling who just applied for her residency permit in Spain!
Didn’t we all know there was something ‘off’ about her? I thought it was because she kept having babies. I guess it goes deeper than that. I wonder how much Alec knew.
Alec is in video clips where he playfully mimics her accent. I’m really curious if he thought it was authentic.
I am sorry, but this is hilarious (no pun intended).
Does she have a flawless Spanish accent? I am a native speaker but have never heard her speak Spanish.
She is fluent in Spanish and sounds like a native. I’m so confused. Her being bilingual is obviously true, but she has obviously been down playing her American roots too.
Ohhhhh…. her dad was a lawyer in Boston with a BA in Spanish literature! Ahhhh…. So maybe she was encourage to learn Spanish growing up in Boston, and they might have regularly vacationed in Spain, hahaha. That does not a Spaniard make.
That does not a Spaniard make indeed, If those are the requirements, I am American (I am not, I am Argentinian) .
Honestly, the sole fact that she is a white American from a well-off family on the east coast who is fluent in Spanish to THAT degree is cool enough on its own. Like, that’s enough. She could have done a lot with just that without having to pretend she’s fucking Spanish.
I was just going to post, this is HILARI-OUS. You beat me to it!
I’m fascinated by the lengths some women will go to in their defense of a woman they view as a idealized version.
Even in these comments people are downplaying what she’s done or deliberately misstating the issue.
Yes, Spaniards are often white. Yes, people give their children names outside of their culture. But this woman played a fake accent, a whole persona that isn’t Spanish at all and chose the names of her children to further that lie.
And people are giving her a pass because she’s pretty/white/practices yoga/immediately lost her baby weight/is still skinny after 5 babies/puts on the facade of a dedicated wife and mother.
Correct, if I found out my neighbor was not really Bosnian but from Minnesota, I would have some serious questions for her. She is a con artist.
It’s clearly cultural appropriation. You can appreciate Spanish culture without pretending you are Spanish. There is clearly something deficient in her personality to carry the lie this far and this publicly knowing she would be caught out eventually.
It’s been said in these comments, but that is what blows me away is that in a day with internet and social media, how did she think she could pull this off? It’s not a prank she was trying to pull off. She lived it and eventually got caught. She must have known she was on borrowed time living out this farce.
Her defenders are infuriating as well. They look pass all of her gaslighting and mental manipulations and just see what they project onto her: beauty, wealth, ‘wonderful mom’; and therefore she can’t be a bad person so they won’t accept that her actions show who she is. She can be beautiful and wealthy and still be willing to manipulate the public to further her goals of constant attention and validation.
Her lies and the cultural appropriation are weird, bizarre and dismissive to all of the people who were mocked, teased and/or bullied just for being an immigrant with English as a second language and/or speaking with an accent.
Yup. The miles you can get out of white privilege even while passing yourself off as a Spanish speaking immigrant is impressive as hell.
Spaniards are white and the Spanish immigrants I’ve met come from educated backgrounds. Claiming to be a Spaniard is not equivalent to being disadvantaged.
I agree. She pretended to be Spanish. She lied about who she was. It’s bizarre. It’s not EVIL or anything, but it certainly is not OK.
Exotic = non white to many people and I think that’s how it’s meant here. I agree it’s not a great word to use but it is used as in non white. As in Hilaria tries to act less white in order to be more “interesting. ” as a boring white girl, I have noticed that a lot of guys love non white women who are not black. And I think sometimes white women kind of pick up some of the style/culture aspect of other races to seem more “unique/sexy.” Some men consider other races to be more sexual than white women and some white women are trying to copy that imo for men’s approval. Note I say some, not all, please don’t yell at me!
I hear you. I worked with a white, American woman who made a huge deal about knowing several different languages (Portuguese, Mandarin and English) and somehow she managed to work it into every conversation. And when we were out socially, she used it as part of her flirtation act. I saw some white guys really eat it up. I wouldn’t say she was lying (although I have no idea how well she spoke Portuguese or Mandarin) but it, combined with her tendency to wear really flamboyant coats like a purple feathered one, always felt like an inauthentic schtick to me.
@joanna
Thank you for writing that. When I was younger and still dating I too often encountered white American guys who would go for “exotic” women. For various reasons. White American women do it too. They get fascinated with anybody from a foreign country with an accent especially one who throws money around. When I visited a couple different foreign countries a few men followed me because I was a white American. The fascination is largely human nature.
As a dark skinned Mexican American – I totally get where you’re coming from – I can’t hide that I’m “other” so I will get asked where I’m from and when I answer Texas – they ask where my parents are from. I’ve also been told I’m spicy, etc. So I just roll my eyes at this nonsense and point and laugh because it’s embarrassing for her! Offensive? yes. However this year has really set the bar HIGH for what upsets me to my core. I’m just having my coffee and laughing my butt off at all the funny memes on Instagram.
@ Joanna The majority of Spanish people are white, so I don’t think that she tried to seem non white
I dunoooo…. as a black woman who’s never had a problem catching a dick (thank you, Amy Schumer!) of any hue, I’d say people are *also* attracted to us. Seems a weird delineation to make, though I understood your other points.
@osito, I didn’t mean to imply that you are not as sexy. I’m sorry. Just seems in my experience that some men seem to have almost a “fetish” for Asian or Latina women. I live in an area with a relatively small percentage of African American women so my assumption may be off base.
Joanna, thank you for clarifying. Awful people often fetishize members of other ethnicities/races and even classes, and black women are definitely included that abhorrent behavior. I mean, “black fishing” is a real concept out here for a reason, and there is tons of academic literature that analyzes the heavy focus and oversexualization of black female bodies since this country’s inception. There are *also* colorist/racist/internally racist fetishists who include and exclude people from their pool of potential partners based on skin tone or stereotypes about behavior/attitudes that are often classist as well.
None of that is right, and I’m not jumping to have black women be included in one more form of siloing and oppression, but your phrasing caught me off guard — I get that there might not be many black women/people in your area, but the phrase “a lot of guys love non white women who are not black,” was jarring in how thoroughly it participated in excluding black women for no reason. My initial response was to make a bit of a joke about it, but what you said actually excludes us from a painful reality that we’ve lived historically and still live today, and one that should unify us as women, but clearly does not immediately do so. A lot of guys are misogynistic, and say horrible things about women and do horrible things to women of all races. A lot of women, as you pointed out, are racist in their cultural predation, taking what they like from POC and BIPOC and being praised for it while we are maligned.
I’m really not trying to jump down your throat about it either. I appreciate the civility of your response, and really hope that this is a moment where we can see exactly how more damage can be inflicted where othering occurs. I just see a parallel to what we’re talking about with the Hilaria issue and the one we’re addressing in this sub-thread: What she’s done is silly when she’s viewed as an individual; when she’s viewed as a part of a larger system that praises white-presenting people for things that black-and-brown presenting people are oppressed for doing/being, we can see how gross the behavior really was.
lol I went to college with a British girl (in Houston) who called herself “just exotic enough”
She’s trying to say that WE misunderstood her and that journalists are to blame. Girl, stop. The gig is up. As a Latin person who works so hard to not have an accent and speak the best English possible because it’s my second language since I was three, I will not tolerate an American woman capitalizing on a fake accent and Hispanic stereotypes because you needed a personality and a way to stand out. I’ve gotten dirty looks if I forget an English word. My English has to be on point or I’m treated differently. I’ve had people mock my accent if I slip. It’s not ok to cosplay someone like me for notoriety. We can all deeply love different cultures and be inspired by them but we don’t craft entire new identities based on lies and half truths. You WANTED everyone to think you’re a Spanish woman, and sis? Even Spaniards are confused by you right now. They’re not even offended. They’re more like, huh??? So please just stop pretending this is on us. You’re freaking weird.
THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG!
This is why it is cultural appropriation!
Pulled a page out of the Rumper’s book I see
Hilary was simply bored of her white upper class up-bringing and decided she exoticise her life story by pretending to be Spanish (which is still white btw and leads to another issue about Hispanic identity in the US and Latin America). But the bigger question is did Alec Baldwin now all along what Hilary was lying about her background?
Yeah, I mean did she use the accent around the house? So many questions…
I LOVE THIS SHIT! This is the scandal we need. I’ve had a rough few days, I’m loving this distraction.
@lobstah, Thank you for that, I almost choked on my tea from laughing out loud.
@lobstah — you know I laugh reading your post because this is what I think; I do not see anything more deep than this being a good gossiping opportunity at the end of a terrible year!
May 2021 be better! (gosh I got closed to #BeBest 🙂 )
Agreed – give me light fluffy second hand embarrassment all day! She’s going to be JUST FINE. Alec might look at her sideways but he’s 5 kids deep – what can he really do. No one is calling her an awful person but just simply pointing out HOW NOT SPANISH SHE IS. Other people seem to be missing the point – it’s not that all Spanish people aren’t white – it’s that SHE is claiming to be Spanish although her family runs GENERATIONS deep American. which is plain old white. sure – you might be European hundreds of years ago – but your heritage and culture? That’s what you grow up in, the environment you experience everyday growing up – and she grew up as an American from Boston – which is a VERY AMERICAN CENTRIC place. She’s a liar. How cringe.
Maybe that’s why she was spitting out those babies so rapidly – to solidify her chances of Alec staying when he found her out – child support for all those kids will not be cheap.
Exactly. I’m a bland white Canadian but if you go back a number of generations I have French and Scandinavian ancestry. Oh, and I’m a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin too. Does that mean I can swan around speaking with a French or Nordic accent or wave the Declaration of Independence in people’s faces? Hillary is fake, fake, fake and deserves to be called out for it.
I guess I’m in the minority here. I only know about her from this and other gossip sites, and I’ve never actually played any of the videos, so I didn’t know that she had a fake Spanish accent or that she was supposedly Spanish. But she’s always struck me as a bit of a grifter with a very “me me me” attitude, so I’m not surprised.
Same here – I’ve always found her highly annoying, so I never listened to any of her videos or interviews or anything. I had no idea she was pulling this scam!
It’s kind of fascinating – did Alec know? How did she think she’d get away with it in the internet age? What would make someone invent a whole new persona for themself?
This Latin American cultural appropriation is a problem because she’s using it to make money and get attention. So she should definitely be called out for it.
And it seems like she has been in situations like this before. She comes across as extremely needy, almost desperate. In her push for more attention, she goes too far. And then Alec leaps in to aggressively defend her and gets an ego boost from protecting her. They feed off each other.
Holy shoot man. This is fascinating to me. The fact that she is white af from Boston. And put on the Spanish accent?! And her kids all have spanish names! As if her white mom calls her ‘hilaria’ lol. I bet her dna is strictly white too otherwise she would say “I have roots in Spain.” Her Instagram video was very carefully worded too. She said whole lot of nothing.
just a heads up, people from Spain are white
That’s kind of insulting to all the Spaniards who aren’t. My friends grandparents were all from Sierra Leone but she and her parents are spainiards as they were born there. Don’t forget ethnic groups like Moors and Basques who are very different genetically from what we think of as white.
Having your ethnic background match the place it first originated is a very old fashioned way of thinking about nationality and can get kind of Hitler-y.
Thank you for pointing this out, Circe.
Circe- Moors and Basque have DNA different from what we think of as white? I’ve known many Basques and they are assuredly white with DNA similar to other Europeans. Moor was a cultural term for Muslims, most of whom were North African, genetically closer to Europeans and Middle Easterners than to sub-Saharan Africans. Take a look at Tunisians, Algerians and Moroccans if you don’t believe me.
@SMS: check out a 2012 national geographic study which states that Basques “share unique genetic patterns that distinguish them from the surrounding non-Basque populations.”
Moors was a term used to describe Europeans of African or Arab descent. So of course there are some big differences there.
Circe- DNA shows that Basques are white Europeans who were somewhat genetically isolated for approximately 2000 years. That doesn’t support your comment that they “aren’t what we think of as white”. Also Moor is really a catchall term comparable to Hispanic, which includes any single race or any combination of white, black, Native American or Asian. Additionally Moor, while usually implying North African descent, was also used to describe Sri Lankans, Indians, some Filipinos and Bengalis. “Moors”, like North Africans ranged from dark to olive skinned to blue eyed blondes.
Many Spaniards are blonde-haired and blue-eyed and are considered “white”. Most Central and South Americans are a mix of Spanish and indigenous peoples, hence the darker complexion and hair.
@Jaded, correct. And the continent of Europe is known to have fairer skinned and lighter hair and eyes as one travels north. The farther south, the darker their coloring. Which makes sense based on evolution.
I’m sorry the cucumber video confirms she was full of it. She’s a white Massachusetts blue blood who appropriated being Spanish to make herself less “vanilla” and more exotic. Some people here miss the point, she’s so stoked in privilege she apparently couldn’t even appropriate herself into being less white, but rather what Americans would consider an “exotic” sexy white a la Penelope Cruz. I hope some of ya’ll stop enabling narcissistic behavior. I would have thought the last four years would have taught us Americans that it isn’t “harmless”. Being a culture vulture never is, and her reaction to being called out merely reinforces her entitlement. At the core of it all, Hilaria” apparently doesn’t believe that she is interesting enough unless she creates a fake persona. Well, she’s probably right. No worries, I’m sure she’ll do an Elle interview playing peak victim in all of this a la pharma bro’s girlfriend or something equally unhinged like Red Table Talk since they left the door wide open with Lori Loughlin’s daughter.
Who’s pharma bro?
@ Noely: Umm, Google it. Shkreli was a global news story & still is reported on.
Increíble, me muero de la risa, cómo nadie la había descubierto? Love love love this Hilaria/Hilary story. Is her career over? Fake life, her family supported this, her husband supported this, incredible.
My sister use to take Yoga classes with her I. The city before she met Alec. She had this Spanish persona even then.
Well, Hilary, be careful what you wish for. She went after Amy Schumer for the Christmas post, which was really just Amy’s typical self-deprecating humor. Hilary tried to make it about body shaming. It was not. But Hilary seized the opportunity for faux-outrage and attention. Now she has ALL the attention. She’s totally nuts and I feel bad for her faux-Spanish children. That has to be confusing.
This woman and her fake identity have been an open secret on the interwebs for a long time. She is a liar and she deserves consequences for her actions.
I first read the thread on dc urban mom on this last year. Was hooked.
Spanish doesn’t mean Hispanic. Spaniards are white Europeans so all this talk about how she didn’t want to be a white girl just buffles me. I’
That is true, however, many people in the US group Spanish people with other hispanic/non white/latinx. Like Antonio Banderas famously said “I found out I wasn’t white when I first went to the US”.
She didn’t want to be white Amerian. She wanted to be “different.”
You’ll find many white people will wax poetic about their “exotic” heritages (Native American is a top choice, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese are close seconds (romance languages), Irish (in time for St. Patrick’s Day), and then everything else)
It’s normal to love another culture or find another accent or language more romantic or sexy, etc. We ALL get it and understand. It’s quite another to take on an accent that is not yours along with a heritage and culture that were never yours to tell your life story and profit.
Most here are not saying that Hilary wants to be Latina but wants to be “exotic” in this way.
@lemons, yes!
Thank you, baby Jesus (Hil, that’s Jesús to you) for a good old fashioned wtf celebrity gossip story. It’s the cherry on top of the shit sundae that was 2020.
Mentally ill people do lots of weird stuff. Sometimes, like Hillary, they change their name up and make up a life they never lived because there’s something about their self they can’t stand. Sometimes, like me, they stand in a shower at 2pm drinking tequila and have bouts of anxiety and existential dread.
She seems like she is always seeking some kind of validation or attention. She puts herself out there a lot. Her parents were professors? Maybe they were busy a lot and perhaps there was a time in her childhood where they just didn’t give her the attention a growing child needs. We may never understand why she felt she had to lie. But maybe….maybe she just felt being a boring ol’ boiled chicken white from Boston (I personally think it would be a super cool and historic place to visit or be from) and thought she could spice it up with some Spanish paprika in her background. That’s a whole other kinda problem.
Appalachian, I just wanted to say that your first paragraph resonates deeply in my soul. I don’t know if you intended it to funny, but I caught a dark humor in it and had a little snort reflecting on my own tequila shower moments. You’re an excellent writer (and also absolutely correct about Hilaria).
Thank you OSITO. It was definitely some dark, self depreciating humor lol. I try to laugh at those moments when I’m finally on the other side of the fence. I know at some point the feelings will roll back around, but it’s the moments between the storms that keep me going.
I’m baffled. Alec must have known. Has he never met her parents? Those things come up in conversation, they probably don’t speak Spanish (at least not at native level). And is her Spanish really good enough to pass as native?
Those are the give aways. He must have known and played along because he knew it would get her more attention/help with her influencer status etc.
And she really thought she could keep this secret forever? Again, I’m baffled. People are strange….
Omg…the face she makes when she’s drinking mimosa with those 2 ladies and says her family is from Mallorca…she’s wielding this as a way to somehow make herself more interesting and important, this is truly gross, and wholly offensive to actual immigrants who have to actually deal with entering a new country’s society. She’s really entering peak white woman territory here
Her family IS from Mallorca…. Since 2011 hahahahahahaaaaa
I’m just laughing at the fact people have always compared Elsa Pataky to Hilaria Baldwin as being thirsty AF.
At least Elsa is not a liar and an actual Spaniard LOL
There are generations of Hispanic/Latinx immigrants whose parents did not teach them Spanish because they did not want their children to experience the prejudice and discrimination that they did (and still do, every day) due to their accents. But Hillary from Massachusetts decides that it would be super fun to speak in a thick accent, because when she does it it’s soo interesting and exotic. F her.
This. For everyone saying “But who is it really hurting?” it’s hurting folks who are discriminated against and harassed in America for speaking English with an accent, not play acting at one for funsies and being able to drop it at will and hide in the safety of being rich and 100% from MA. She appeared on the cover of Hola magazine several times with this claim and her own damn website says she was born in Spain and now she’s claiming “journalists” are attacking her and making up stories? Folks defending this mess need to stop.
I have an accent but have never felt any discrimination because I also happen to be a pretty white European woman. I have white privilege, regardless of my accent. It’s simply not right to compare the experience of simply having an accent to the experience of being a POC. Just my two cents.
I did not compare it to the experience of being a POC. I clearly said being discriminated against for speaking with an accent in America. Maybe you haven’t, but PLENTY of people are – even pretty white people.
Thank you, Sunday. My paternal grandparents’ families were from Spain and the Basque regions; they immigrated to Mexico to escape the Inquisition. After the Mexican Revolution, they immigrated to the United States. Because they could “pass” for Anglo, they only spoke Spanish at home and spoke English everywhere else. My father’s generation never learned Spanish and my grandmother “anglicized” her name. We were taught to be proud of who we were, but not encouraged to point out our Spanish/Mexican roots. Even now, there is a division between the “native Mexicans” and “white Christian Mexicans” in my family and Mexican society.
The reality is Hillary misrepresented herself. It is one thing to appreciate Spanish culture; many people name their children names from other cultures, whether to honor someone or because they like the name. But putting on a fake accent and marketing herself as an “exotic Spanish beauty” is intentional misrepresentation at best, appropriation at worst. And why? It must be exhausting to live that way; how can she be who she really is even at home if she lives her (false) life for social media?
This lady is not well. Now is the time to be like “I’m busted. I did this as a ruse to help my yoga business. I then met Alec and then the press talked about me as a person from Spain and I felt like it was too late to back out of the lie. This has been weighing on me for a long time and I’m thankful that it’s out in the open. I apologize for my actions.”
Exactly
She needs to be real and own the lies
But instead she’s creating a universe of lies to justify her previous lies. Her narrative.
Super narcissistic
This would be a great exit strategy. So what is she going to do moving forward…just pretend we don’t know she’s faking?
The funny thing is, I never knew if I heard an accent or not with her in the few interviews I saw her in. In my mind, I didn’t. But
it’s when i heard her name pronounced the way it is, ee-lar-ia, I remember looking her up and reading about Majorca. My sister-in-law was born in Puerto Rico and was raised here until middle school, went back when her parents moved back to PR, and then she came back to America for college and stayed. I never thought she had an accent. But years later, I realized maybe she does have the remnant of an accent on the ending of certain words, but I mistook it just for the tone of her voice. That’s the same way I looked at Hilaria/Hilary. I never thought I really heard an accent, but had a pitch and tone a little different at times that made me wonder since I had read she was from Majorca.
In addition to all the excellent points above, it’s also just pretentious and a tad narcissistic. It must be exhausting to be her or be around her.
I can’t believe her parents went along with it instead of telling her to knock it off!
Yeah, good point. Wonder what the parents think. Google brought up an early article about her that referred to her mom as Spanish, which is an awkward position to put her mom in.
This story is nuts and there is no doubt her Spanish is at fluent level, but instead of promoting her achievement of mastering a second language, raising her kids bilingual, and saying how much she loves Spain, she had to pretend she immigrated and whitewash her whole backstory.
Bingo. If she spent summers there as a kid and her family is now permanently retired in Spain (and I believe a sibling) and she loves the culture and she is fluent in Spanish, I can see wanting your children to grow up learning Spanish, as it is a place you hope to bring your children a lot with extended family now living there permanently. There was no need to embelish her life in a way that insinuated she grew up in both America and Spain, and eventually she just outright lied as she got caught up in this new persona she was creating since moving to NYC.
That’s what drives me crazy too! If she just stuck to the original story, which is that she was a white girl raised in a rich family in Massachussets, whose father loved Spain and Spanish culture and was fluent in the language to the degree that his children were also fluent, that would have been interesting enough to set her apart, lmao. But instead we get this. It’s just weird.
I am so fascinated by the stupidity of this! I started snooping around and found this company owned apparently by “Hilaria’s” brother. She and Alec give an endorsement at the bottom of the page but there doesn’t seem to be any indication that she is related to the owner. The grift is strong with this family!
https://www.macro-mediterranean.com/
Fake backstory, fake accent, fake tan and apparently fake hair colo[u]r (she has dark blonde hair naturally).
This is so funny. Sounds like her Spaniard persona started out as a marketing ploy for her yoga business, and it then got out of hand when she hooked up with a celebrity. I feel second-hand embarrassment lol And as someone who is white European with an accent, I can confirm that I’ve never been treated like a lesser human or denied any benefit due simply to being foreign and having an accent. I think to conflate the experience of being foreign to the experience of being a POC is a disservice to the genuine discrimination that POC experience, regardless of their place of birth or accent. As long as you’re white, you have the privilege, regardless of your accent. I honestly don’t think this is as problematic as if she pretended to be a POC, like that Rachel person had done.
Yes, thank you!!! This is what I was trying to share here.
Trust me, you don’t have that privilege even if you’re white. My privilege goes out the window the moment certain people learn where I am from, regardless of my pristine English, my extremely pale skin, my very European features and my very regional east coast accent (are you from NYC? You sound kind of bostonian, etc)
I get that you have never been mocked for speaking with an accent, but do not play this down just because your experience has been positive. Many of us have explained why this is insulting to us and we all have one thing in common – our foreign languages and varying degrees of an accent.
Hillary mocked immigrants who speak a second language with an accent. Immigrants who have been belittled, mocked, insulted, and even harassed, for having an accent. She does not have an accent yet she chose to use one as a COSTUME the same way people use black face at Halloween. It’s wrong, it’s insulting and it’s infuriating.
So you DON’T have a foreign accent, and people have responded negatively to you telling them about your country of origin…? I think you proved my point that accent is not determinative. You DON’T have an accent but still feel discriminated against because of your country of origin, which is likely predominantly non-Caucasian (I may be wrong) even if you personally happen to have white features. I have an accent and don’t feel discriminated against because I grew up in the “desirable” countries of Western Europe. The most I get are people wanting to tell me about their ski trip. Hilaria is a pretty white woman that pretended to be from a Western European country. She got ahead because of it, not despite of it. That’s the point. I don’t dare compare my struggles to those of POC. But, as I said, that’s just my two cents.
I’m blown away at the idea that being hissed at to “go back to your own country”, having people assume you can’t speak English, throwing out your resume because your name is Spanish looking, being accused of stealing a job, living off the government, etc doesn’t count as discrimination because you speak Spanish with white skin.
People in America are downright nasty to those they perceive to be Spanish speaking immigrants, regardless of how pale they are, what kind of accent they speak with, etc. Clearly brown people absolutely usually have it worse and white Spanish/Latina/Hispanics do benefit from colorism but it’s very odd to me to pretend anti Hispanic/Latina discrimination isn’t that big a deal and/or isn’t comparable to POC experiences.
You stated that you speak with an accent but have faced no issues because you’re pretty white and European therefore you are treated well by racist people because they EXCUSE YOUR ACCENT based on your looks and your whiteness.
Well, Hilary seized on your same privilege to get ahead, used a fake accent to speak English, thus mocking every single immigrant in the US who has faced discrimination and violence due to, you guess it, speaking with an accent.
Your accent is real, hers isn’t and that’s the whole point, which you keep missing.
Having an accent and not being white are two issues that go hand by hand in the US. A dozen people on this page have given first hand accounts of what they’ve suffered due to having accents while people like Hilary have faked it and not been discriminated against, just like you have. I am glad you’ve only had positive and happy experiences with your accent, but just accept that that is not the case for most people in the US, especially those not deemed “white”.
I come from a country built on colonization, slavery, genocides, and European immigration, just like the US. I descend from different European ethnicities but my nationality makes some people in the US uncomfortable, especially as I don’t fit into their stupid racial stereotypes. And my lack of an accent just confuses them even more. So while I don’t have an accent, unlike you, my nationality makes me a target, unlike yours’. And while my accent has never been mocked, I’ve witnessed many instances in which someone’s accent has been called out and that is why we will never agree on the real issue with Hilary’s fake accent and why it is insulting to so many people.
I completely agree. My Spanish mother moved here after marrying my American father and I couldn’t say she suffered any discrimination. At worst, she resented when some people assumed she came from a disadvantaged background when she actually grew up very privileged. People admired her for her fluency in four languages and frequent travel abroad. I would never compare her experience as an “immigrant” (she kept her Spanish nationality) to that of any POC.
After reading quite a few comments on here I feel like everyone should go find Tracie Morrisey’s Instagram deep dive on the subject, she covers what EVERYONE is questioning or confused out. Hilary (on a podcast) says she didn’t come to this COUNTRY until she attended NYU at 19. She uses a fake accent and pretends to forget the English word for cucumber on an interview with GMA. She claims Spanish heritage but since both her parents are fully in public and notable there are several interviews where BOTH run several generations deep as Americans. She fully made this persona up as a possible way to stand out in the Yogi community and then she had to keep it going with Alec because he found it so interesting. Other people have reached out to Tracie on Instagram saying that over a dinner party she claimed to forget the English word for ice or water – this is what white privileged people think immigrants actually sound like. As a first generation American – it’s offensive – I’m also Mexican – I’m not completely up in arms and ready to get my pitchforks but I have no accent. I don’t forget what the words are for things in English – and English was my second language. My parents only speak Spanish to this day and I’m fluent in both. It’s more hilarious that she got caught so publicly and over a silly Amy Schumer post. Where Amy was making a joke about her own body and how it’s NOT like Hiliarias. She wanted attention – here it is.
Did she? Or was she saying she came “here” at 19, meaning NYC, and they misunderstood and thought she meant to this country at 19, and she misled them as they went on, instead of correcting them, and began talking in word salad answers to be evasive, by saying my family is in Marjorca, present tense. Well, they do presently live in Majorca. Again, knowing they are thinking, oh, her family is “from” Majorca, thus she is from Majorca. I felt like she dug herself deeper in that interview and was evasive as she led them to believe she was born in another country without actually ever saying she was.
I saw her agency profile (where you can hire her as a speaker-god help us) and it does say she was born in Spain.
This woman has always been thirstier than a pretzel salesman stranded in the desert. It doesn’t shock me at all that she’d do this.
Yes!!! All of those yoga poses. All of the weird Instagram stuff. She is dry as dust thirsty!!!!
It’s like she thinks she converted to Spaniardism.
That’s funny! Also funny is her posting a defensive video asserting “Europe is full of white people.” That’s the new “water is wet.”
She’s a white woman pretending to be another type of white woman. She did it to be considered exotic and appealing to the 60 yo man who was rumored to be into Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz at the time. And it worked! lol
This feels like the best kind of romcom – messy. If this isn’t made into a movie starring, Anne Hathaway, I will be severely disappointed. Como se dice”cucumber” has been said at least 100x in my house.
I’ve gotten so many laughs from twitter because of it. It’s a great way to end the year.
Hilaria, you’re alright with me.
LOL Alec is a snob. Hilary coming from a well-educated family (parents with impressive careers), private schools, vacationing summers in Spain,fluent in a second language, her yoga studio in NYC and passion for yoga and health, and soooo much younger than him was more than enough. He was on Howard Stern, and he admitted the age difference makes him insecure and that he can be very, very jealous. Hilaria/Hilary came on the zoom interview and said he is very jealous. He can’t believe he has her. He indulges her TV career aspirations. He tried, through his connections, to get her on one of those entertainment shows. He got her a few gigs, but nothing permanent came out of it.
What I find interesting is she suffered from anorexia and bulemia in her late teens/early twenties. At least, that’s what her wiki page now says. Does she have a need to be perfect, to be admired? She is definitely thirsty for some kind of fame. That doesn’t mean she isn’t a devoted mother and wife. But I would love to hear what our resident psychologists, who post on this site, think about her and the psychology of her behavior regarding her background and completely misleading people.
Not a psychologist (& it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to diagnose her if I were), but she strikes me as a woman who lacks a sense of self, so she constantly searches for an identity. Hilary from Boston wasn’t enough, so she became Hilaria from Spain. Being a yoga teacher was an identity, but then she jumped to trying to be a celebrity wife, then tried being a TV personality. That didn’t quite take off, as you noted, so she tries to be a social media influencer whose identity revolves around having lots of kids, being pregnant much of the time & “getting her body back” very quickly.
I have no doubt she enjoys being a mom & wife, but I can’t help but think she doesn’t feel comfortable with who she is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I_kujj45lc
Commenters seem to agree she speaks like a native Spaniard.
I think Alec Baldwin is drawn to the eccentric ones. Kim Basinger for example.
I don’t know what Hillary’s issue is but her family must be embarrassed.
I mean….look, as a WOC, I have to say that white women trying to invent a more interesting backstory for themselves is not something that’s new. The best I can explain it is that they just don’t feel like they’re very interesting people as is, and so they have to lie to make themselves cooler. It’s all very, “My uncle works at Nintendo!” or at least in the same sort of category. “My uncle and my whole extended family live in Spain, which is where we’re from!”
Kids do this a lot. I remember being a kid and seeing and hearing other kids pretending to be stuff they weren’t. It lends you a certain cachet, and makes you the center of attention. You get to be different, but in a *cool* way, which can be nice if you have a chip on your shoulder about not being the center of attention y’know? Most people grow out of that by the time they become adults. The ones who don’t start lifestyle blogs and become Instagram influencers.
Serious question: where are the videos of her fake accent? I watched some Instagram videos from earlier this year, and she didn’t have a Spanish accent in those?
Yeah, I never really heard an accent either. Sometimes it seemed like the inflection of her words were pitched higher. But my friend is as American as they come and her voice was pitched higher in the way she talked.
Check out Tracie Morrisey’s Instgram story labeld Hilaria – she has a clip of her on a morning show speaking in her weird fake accent – and then it just gets BETTER from there.
white woman in academia here. academia has had an epidemic of white women passing themselves off as some other ethnicity. I mentor young women who are mostly first generation college students from a variety of backgrounds. it is a problem because 1) representation IS important and 2) it sows mistrust. taking on a whole other identity is not quirky, but seriously pathological and damaging, I can’t with this woman.,
Presumably she pretended that her ethnicity is European white, thus was not really assuming another ethnicity.
Oh got it. Reading quickly. It’s still offensive that she needs to borrow an identity to be more interesting. She’s thirsty, that’s for sure.
race and ethnicity are not the same so yes, assuming another ethnicity is exactly what she did.
Now do her age!
Lol! Also, agreed!
The best Tweet out of this whole thing:
https://twitter.com/ltotheucy/status/1342689196771856386?s=20
Lol!
🤣🤣🤣🤣
“And where in Ohio are you from?” – Dead.
Someone on Twitter called her Paella Dolezal and I love it.
To anyone defending her by claiming “oh, people just misunderstood her coming to NYC at 19 with coming to the US”… yeah, she still went along with it. She obviously never corrected anyone talking about her as a Spanish woman – so it doesn’t really make a difference if her lie was based on a misunderstanding.
I think she knew exactly what she was doing – she used a fake persona to gain more interest in her Yoga classes and then met Alec. Hilary kept the act up to keep him interested and then went on with it. She worded everything very carefully in word salads so if she would ever get called out on it, she could pretend that people just misunderstood.
They didn’t misunderstand “I came here at 19.” That’s exactly what she intended them to get from that statement.
I found out today she helped found the yoga studio my sister got her yoga certification from in NYC haha! However she has not been involved with that studio for awhile so my sister never met her while going through her yoga teacher training.
When I saw this story on Twitter yesterday, I didn’t understand the huge deal but I didn’t do much research. In a way I can relate to Hillary/Hilaria being bilingual and I thought that was what the fuss was all about. Now I realize she straight up lied about being Spanish, being from Spain, and having a fake accent. So she spent some summers in Spain as a kid and clearly picked up the language and accent really well and somehow spin this into “I am Spanish and I am from Spain!” Wow. I lived in Spain for two years and I’m pretty fluent in Spanish, so I’m well-versed in Spanish people and the language and I was LOLing about this all morning.
I am born and raised in the States but I am fluent in French. My level of fluency is also unusual for someone who did not live for any significant amount of time in France. I have a French name that my parents gave me and I didn’t change it from Amelia or Emily. Unlike Hilaria though, I have a direct cultural connection to France through my dad who is ACTUALLY from France. My entire paternal side of the family resides in France. I visited France every summer to see relatives. I went to a French-American school for a whole decade in the USA. I have a French passport and I hold French citizenship. However, I have never pretended to claim to be more French than American. I have never lived there (apart from a study abroad stint in college and I don’t count that). I don’t speak English with a French accent (I can’t even imitate the accent, it sounds so fake and laughable). I have had moments where I sometimes forget the English word for something but it’s not common and my confusion lasts for maybe a few seconds. I don’t usually volunteer any of this information unless people ask me about my name (both my first and last name are very French). On the surface I look like any white American woman from the Northeast and I’m fine with it.
@ Thank you, Amelie, for sharing that you sometimes forget a word for few seconds. I have the same issue. I immigrated to the UK as an adult and I’m therfore able to communicate in my mother tongue and English. However, sometimes it takes me a second to come up with a word, as only the version in one language pops into my head. It’s not that I want to draw attention to the fact that I’m an immigrant or want to show people at home that I have been living in the UK and therefore speak English. It sometimes just happens. Therefore, I personally don’t find the cucumber video that bad. She remembered the word in a matter of seconds. I know a lot of people are making fun about this segment, but this could easily happen to me.
We all forget words sometimes, but I don’t think I’ve ever said “what’s the English word for that?” given that English is my first language.
And she didn’t say “what’s the english word for” she said “how you say in English” which is what you would say if you were a beginner English language speaker and were not used to the English grammar of auxilllary verbs in questions. I worked for over ten years as an ESL teacher, in the US and abroad (including a year in Spain, which I guess makes me Spanish!) and to use grammar like this in a professional on-screen setting and to forget the name of the vegetable you ostensibly use in your American life enough to be hired to speak about it professionally is really indicative of an elementary level English speaker. Which-nothing wrong with that! But even a true elementary level speaker (who could be an acclaimed check in their native tongue) would practice enough that they would not forget this! But she LIVED her entire life in the US! This is not a thing that happens! Sorry I love to travel and have spent significant amounts of time in many countries-vacationing somewhere doesn’t make you a native, nor does it make you forget your native tongue.
Thanks @Bonnie I, too, feel 100% New Mexican, because, wait for it, I was born in New Mexico. An American state since 1912. This is all new to me, all I knew of HB is she’s married to Alec Baldwin, often pregnant and thirsty.
What a hot mess. May this bring the downfall of ALL social media influencers. They are all fake in one way or another.
She cosplayed as a Spanish woman and it’s gross AF.
I’m just cackling at how much Alec got PLAYED. And proceeded to have baby after baby after baby with her in his senior years. Idiot
I remember looking at pics of the kids and they all appeared to be blond and blue eyed? Surely if she has natural dark hair and eyes some of the kids would as well? Does she wear brown contacts too?! Nutter.
What did she say her last name was up until she married Alec? Because that should have been a dead give away that she was not from Mallorca
Exactly! Her name, also in the early posts here about her, was Hilaria Thomas…
According to an early article about her, she was going with the persona of a Spanish mother and American father with a childhood traveling between the two, so that explained her anglo last name. It’s sort of clever I guess in that it’s just enough truth to be plausible (i.e. she does have an American father and did step foot in Spain once or twice as a child).
I bet her Latin teacher called her Hilaria and she went with that.
Just to make sure I am keeping up:
-She can pretend to be a Spaniards because it’s another form of being white; even though she promotes herself on LA magazines as “other”. That’s totally ok BUT Beyonce can’t try to enunciate words in an interview without being called fake, dumb, and ignorant
-She can pretend to not know English words as a parlor trick because “who is she hurting?” Even though it’s perpetuating stereotypes that White liberals are ok with laughing at. BUT we can criticize and pick on Duchess Do Little Kate for speaking in a posh accent
-It’s totally not weird to pretend to be Spanish and name your kids Spanish/LA type names to continue the lie BUT Beyonce and Jay Z can be mocked for naming their son Sir.
This is disgusting and telling of the inherent biases we have in our society to think a White American woman can get certain bypasses.
You’re bringing up a really valid and interesting point that people keep forgetting: Hilaria Baldwin-Thomas-Hayberry does not live in a vacuum, and her behaviors and our reactions to those behaviors are indicative of *American* social mores and values that are oppressive to *most* and easily flouted by the white and the wealthy.
I feel badly for her. I hope she isn’t destroyed by social media because in the greater scheme of things it doesn’t matter that she pretended to be something she isn’t. I mean, so what? It’s kind of funny and not as serious as pretending to be a good person when you’re actually a rapist like Bill Cosby or a pedo like Kevin Spacey. If only all the lies told by celebrities were this innocuous.
All these celebrities are fake to some degree. And no, we don’t need to excuse them for lying, based on your perceptions of what is innocuous.
Excuse me? Did my comment warrant an attack? Have a nice day, Jules.
Jules didn’t attack you. It was a very calm statement disagreeing with what you perceive to be an innocuous offense.
Lol… oh, the victimization!
She’s right in that case. But a person can be occasionally right and still be the asshole in plenty of other situations. Like responding to domestic violence by attacking someone for pointing out that the abused person was being victim-blamed, instead of attacking the man who shot the younger woc or the people doing the victim-blaming. Turning a model’s coming forward about being sexually assaulted into a chance to shame her for putting herself out there in the first place. Just the tip of the iceburg. Your instincts aren’t completely off Linda.
What she did isn’t innocuous. She has a white American lawyer dad, so she definitely knew when she was dancing on the edge of truth. She made comments about how people thought she was the kids’ nanny because she “isn’t blonde and blue eyed” and talked about her native language being Spanish and tried to play off people calling her out- people who often were Latina/Latino- as liars. You don’t put on another ethnicity like a costume. She talked about raising her children bilingual as she claimed she was. She adopted a persona she had no right to adopt, and you get a bunch of white people saying she did no harm.
I bet Alec Baldwin knew. Maybe not from the moment he met her, but they probably have a prenup, and he had to meet her family sometime. Although, the idea that she convinced her parents to fake their own Spanish accents every time the spoke to Alec…
I’m pretty sure Alec knows at this point. But there is a small part of me that would find it hilarious if this was the first he was hearing about it too 🤣🤣
It’s like the plot of a terrible rom-com. Rich, privileged, white woman that hasn’t broken through in the ballroom dancing/yoga community (they just won’t give her a chance). She is almost broke and doesn’t want to have to crawl back to her upper class, Boston family and agree to marry her ex boyfriend who is a lawyer from a prominent family. So she hatches a plan with her quirky BFF to pretend to be from Spain to get ahead and make a name for herself. “I mean, I did vacation in Mallorca growing up and the locals say my accent is just as good as theirs so in a way I suppose I am a Spaniard. What harm is there in a tiny lie?”
Suddenly, she is the “it” yoga instructor when one day an A list actor comes to her class. They hit it off and he falls in love with her but the lie is eating her up. Then one day, the truth comes out and everyone turns their back on her except her BFF who spends days on end listening to her cry “why me?” when suddenly, the Actor comes back into her life and says that he doesn’t care if she lied. He fell in love with the yoga not the accent.
Just about peed my pants reading this 🤣
Favorite comment of the day.
That last line. You could sell this.
Just looked through her IG and man is it irritating. Look at how I bounce back from pregnancies. So boring really. She’s very proud of herself – who cares and how is she remarkable?
My daughter: “Why go through all that to hook Alec Baldwin?” Lolololol
See, this is where I’m at. I guess she wanted fame more than… whatever she would have gotten from a more traditional match.
I would go through a lot for Hunt for Red October – era Alec Baldwin.
“Married to the Mob” Alec Baldwin
How many commenters here had no problem with Elizabeth Warren pretending to be Cherokee for two decades? Wondering what the difference is ESPECIALLY since Native Americans are actually marginalized.
Sigh. Warren didn’t “pretend” to be anything. She, and entire family, accepted a long-told family legend as fact. It is a GOP lie that she ever presented or idenitfied herself as Native American in any academic setting, or used such a claim to get any position she’s ever held. The one time such a thing was listed in any Warren academic bio, was an administrator making the claim, not Warren herself. None of her job applications or college transcripts or anything of the like have her claiming indigenous heritage for preferential treatment, despite how the GOP likes to pretend that’s what happened. She never applied for tribal membership or any other special privilege. Warren simply told a story about her genelology her whole family believed to be the truth. My Grandma has told me a lot of stories about her family origins I also presume are true, but hardly have DNA documentation to back up. That doesn’t make me, or even her, a fraud.
Forget about her lineage. Her eyebrows are the real problem.
I just wanted to add that almost everyone commenting here has cracked me up and made my day better.
Thanks!
This is very strange and I do not know how she thought this would be exposed given her fame thirst. Something tells me Kim Bassinger is having a full-throated laugh over all this
I have to admit I feel conflicted about this. On the one hand, it’s clear she’s been misleading her followers and interviewers/journalists about her background. She’s let assumptions go uncorrected and lied by omission. It’s not ok. On the other hand, wtf does Amy Schumer have to do with it? I’m white, American, English-speaking, and raised outside of Boston like Hillary. I spent one year in an immersion program in Spain in college and when I got home, I *did* occasionally forget basic English words. It’s a thing that happens. We can knock Hillary for lying. But it’s stupid for Amy (who I like and follow on social media) to pile on.
I haven’t stopped laughing about this, Honestly, it’s too insane to me to be offensive. 😂 It’s straight up just hilariously dumb. Like…unless the Spanish are a marginalized nationality in Europe in a way I’m not aware of, what’s even the gain of this kind of cosplay? She’s not pretending to be Latina, so no ethnic minority woke points to mine from the Internet, and there’s no crucially significant racial angle she’s working like Rachel Dolezal. It’s literally just like…some weird American little girl fantasy she created and maintained into adulthood like some bizarre rich kid game of pretend that somehow thrived past maturity??
Real talk, guys: DID ALEC KNOW?? HAS HE BEEN PLAYING ALONG WITH HIS WIFE THIS WHOLE TIME, LETTING HER STRING PEOPLE ALONG THIS FANTASY IN HER HIGH NASALLY, BABY GIRL VOICE?? Does he get off on it? Does he see it as part of having a young yoga wife, indulging her little eccentricities?? I must know!!
It is funny. At least she didn’t destroy her career with blatant racism like Jessica Mulroney.
“some bizarre rich kid game of pretend “
What was the show with the weird rich kids and Gwyneth Paltrow? This totally fits that vibe.
If she wasn’t pretending to be Latina, why keep talking about being bilingual and raising her kids bilingual because that was how she was brought up? Why use an accent when speaking English and pretend not to know English words? Why claim she was mistaken for her kids’ nanny because she wasn’t blond and blue eyed (her words)? Why do you think Latinx people are offended and angry, but a bunch of white people aren’t?
I’m pretty sure Alec Baldwin does not give one hoot what accent she uses as long as she stays hot and fluent in … cucumber.
The Today show segment -where she pretends to not know the english word for cucumber- is probably the worst example and hardest to watch
Why do people lie about these things in this digital age? If she’d just come out from the beginning as the Spanish version of a Francophile ( Espanophile?), no one would bat an eye, and she could deep dive all she wanted into the culture. Being an upper class WASP was too basic for her I guess. She’ll be embarrassed, but will be forgiven and maybe write a book about it. Also, giving all her kids Spansidh names is no big deal. Parents name their kids everything under the sun these days, regardless of cultural background, but this is part of her whole deception. Such a weird thing to do. Guess being European and Spanish to her seemed way more interesting and made her stand out more. She snagged Alec Baldwin with it. He must have known after a few dates, I hope 😬.
The bigger questions is why was she allowed to get away with this for so long? It’s not like social media was born yesterday.
Even in magazine interviews they published she was born in Spain ! LOL like they didn’t even bother to fact check? She didn’t bother to correct them either. Insane.
On twitter, talking to one of her followers months ago, who is Spanish-speaking, and texted to her in Spanish, Hilaria replied, in English, back to her that she was born in Boston, but spent much of her childhood in Spain. Oops. Edit. Those were tweets back in 2011 and 2012 telling followers the above back in the early days of dating and marrying Baldwin..
She can’t keep her stories straight. I guess she’s so unimportant no one really paid close attention to her every-changing storyline. I think she has mental problems.
Her post is ridiculous. Her parents moved to Spain in 2011 ! She was an adult at that time. She’s making it seem like they moved back “home” to Spain and she decided as a young kid to stay in America LMAO ! How can you just decide to be Spanish? Honey you are NOT Spanish !
Is she actually fluent in Spanish? Where’s the proof?
Very stupid behavior.
Oh, my, it gets worse. There’s a snapshot of an old tweet from Latina Magazine to Hilaria in July 2013 praising Hilaria on her relationship with Ireland and telling Hilaria: “You made our best #Latina stepparent list.”
Hilaria responds, calling Ireland “a very special chica.”
And replying “gracias” when Latina magazine Tweeted her that they had put her on their 10 Best Dressed Latinas list! She was completely pretending to be Latina.
I saw her on some morning show a week ago and remember thinking, “I thought she had a Spanish accent… guess I was wrong.” Turns out my memory wasn’t failing me. She was just gaslighting us all.
Googled her as I’m not too familiar with who she is and she looks much older than 36.
I am sure Alec has known about this and was in on this ruse. We do not really know these people, we only know the side they show us.
Many actors/singers/performers change their names and go by a stage name and even make up a past. So that’s nothing new. She just took it a step further. If she had true skeletons in her closet and wanted to keep them a secret, why would she assume such a public persona knowing it could come out at any time? someone with something to hide would not necessarily behave as she has. I think she is embarrassed, but not traumatized by this exposure.
Wait I know about this eyebrow thing: microblading gone bad.
Hillary has a bad case of eyebrow hyperblading, baby fetish and the ongoing identity crisis can’t help matters unless she next plans to go full Arab octomom and make a soft porn flick.
Everyone parsing the situation, please stop. This white woman took an fascination and time spent in Spain as a way to make herself more interesting. How lovely for her that her “background” and accent afforded her this beautiful life she literally sells while my family is told to go back to where they came from.
And I do believe that, while Spain and Spanish people are mostly considered white (aside from people of color born there), it is a preferable version of those from South America/the islands for the mainstream people. It’s “exotic” and “foreign” but an acceptable version, a whitewashed version.
I have no interest in hearing anything more about her and hope her little fame disappears.
Wait what?!!! I’m only hearing about this now. I’m shocked. How did she escape the scrutiny this long and I want to know if Alec knows which depends on if she keeps up the act even with him. They have many kids together so I hope for their sake this doesn’t affect their family unit.
What a strange story. I never heard her speak or care about Alec to follow his news so I’m curious about how they met and surely after meeting her WHITE family he knew she was faking it
There’s video clips of him playfully mimicking her accent. He was either fooled or helped to play up her Spanish personae.
There are video clips of Alec playfully mimicking her accent. He was either fooled or helped to play up her Spanish personae for her social media career. I’m super interested in knowing which one.
“How do you say….” cucumber… just became the best line of 2020.
I am so completely out of the loop on this woman that I always thought she was an American with one of those fancy names who over-populate certain circles in NY.
And now she’s been masquerading as a Latina it turns out. That’s so pathetic.
On YT they’re saying she sounds native. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I_kujj45lc
There’s little doubt she proactively misled people about this, right? Alec Baldwin seems to be drawn to the eccentrics; see Kim Basinger (who I really like for her animal advocacy stuff).
Here is an article by her father, a lawyer by profession, in 2015 about his love of Spanish culture and food dating back to when he was young and why and his exposure to it. Now, here is the truth, no embellishing, no pretending to actually be Spanish, and it is far more interesting. This is how he brought his love of that to his children and exposed them to it. I imagine they did visit there quite often when she was young. Her father is fluent in Spanish. Why did she feel the need to be something she isn’t? Why wasn’t the truth enough? Her father is an interesting man. Is it that she never felt interesting enough without an embellished back history?
https://internationalintegrators.org/food-and-relationship-slowing-down-to-enjoy-both/
Hmmm…
My parents immigrants. I grew up speaking multiple languages. I currently hold multiple passports. Every summer, from first grade to tenth, I spent three months abroad visiting various relatives. But I was born and mostly raised in LA, so I speak English with an American west coast accent. And while I do forget the English words or phrases, because I initially learned it in another language, I don’t speak English with an accent. So her affected accent is as weird as the posh one Kate puts on.
Jaded, I feel for you, but many Americans envy you for having a normal (and hot) president (prime minister?) and for having non-crazed citizens (who are also normal). And yes, as a Mecca, an escape hatch, from our demented, nihilistic journey into dystopia. I would move to Canada in a heart beat.
The thing that really gets me is the fact that her having grown up in an incredibly affluent, well-educated family, that sent her to expensive private schools her whole life, is in and of itself an interesting enough background that she doesn’t have to pretend to be something she’s not. But whatever.
I do not understand in any way WHY someone would do this, just completely lie about their past when there are so many people that can call them out on it. It’s so embarrassing. Now, with the internet, just come clean. It’s just so odd. Then to fake an accent too?! People are truly crazy.
She really opted out of the Daughters of the American Revolution/Mayflower angle, huh?
😂😂😂😂🤭🤭
I just heard her speak Spanish and her Spanish is excellent. She sounds like a fluent speaker with an almost imperceptible accent. I lived there and summered there so I can tell she’s spent a lot of time in Spain. Apparently her father has a long standing appreciation for Spanish culture. I don’t have an issue with her kids having Spanish names. Kobe Bryant gave his daughters Italian names and no one questions that.
Kobe probably didn’t get pushback on his children’s names because while he was partially raised Italy he never claimed to be Italian.
I think this woman needs therapy. She must have some kind of mental disorder. She even gave Spanish names to her children. This is another level of fakery.
so Mom we are not Spanish? Like how doesn’t one explain this lie? How’s does her husband not begin to ask himself other questions?