Just after Christmas 2020, we were given a beautiful gossip story, a terrific scandal: Hilaria Baldwin had been faking her Spanish backstory and accent for years. All of it was a huge con, a systematic appropriation of “Spanish exoticism.” For years, Hilaria told people she was “from Spain” and even “born in Mallorca.” For years, she claimed that her family lived in Spain and/or came from Spain, and that she came to America as a teenager. As it turns out, she was born and raised in Massachusetts as a plain old Hillary Thomas, with extensive American roots. The one Spanish connection she has is that her parents apparently moved to Spain when they retired. That does not make her Spanish. When the story broke more than four years ago, there were lots of lies and backtracks and “no, I never said that, you just assumed!” In times of crisis, she even dusts off her faithful old Mexican accent (because she can’t even appropriate correctly). Anyway, now that Hilaria is part of a new TLC show about her family, she once again tries to talk around her years of lies.
Hilaria Baldwin is addressing her Spanish accent. In the premiere of the new TLC reality show The Baldwins, which comes out Feb. 23, Hilaria, 41, spoke out about the 2020 controversy over her accent after people began to question the authenticity of her Spanish origins. Years later, she said no one can stop her from embracing her identity.
“I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn’t make me inauthentic, and when I mix the two, that makes me normal,” she noted in a confessional. “I’d be lying if I said [the controversy] didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places.”
“But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” she continued. “That’s normal. That’s called being human.”
When it comes to the children she shares with husband Alec Baldwin — Ilaria Catalina Irena, 2, María Lucía Victoria, 3, Eduardo “Edu” Pao Lucas, 4, Romeo Alejandro David, 6, Leonardo Ángel Charles, 8, Rafael Thomas, 9, and Carmen Gabriela, 11 — Hilaria said no public criticism will stop her from bringing her Spanish culture into their lives.
“I’m raising my kids to be bilingual, I was raised bilingual,” she explained. “My family — all my nuclear family — now lives over in Spain. I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language. I think just growing up and speaking two languages is extremely special.”
We talked about this a lot when Hilaria was first outed – plenty of people feel drawn to other cultures and take great interest in a culture foreign to them. Some people are Francophiles, some are Anglophiles, some are Sinophiles, etc. That’s what you call yourself though – an admirer of another culture, an outsider who has a deep interest in a different culture. Loving Spain and speaking Spanish doesn’t make Hilaria SPANISH, it makes her an Iberophile. People didn’t “out” her for speaking Spanish. They outed her for pretending to be a Spanish woman who faked a pan-Latin-American accent for years. Plenty of people teach their kids multiple languages, it’s not about that either – at no point were people like “I can’t believe she teaches her kids a second language!” Also… the Spanish names for the kids are still so ridiculous, my god. I don’t even believe that Hilaria is all that interested in Spanish culture, she’s like the worst kind of culture vulture, she’s only interested in the most superficial aspects of being fake-Spanish.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.
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- Hilaria Baldwin arrived at the Bronx and Banco fashion show in New York City Featuring: Hilaria Baldwin Where: Manhattan, New York, United States When: 05 Feb 2025 Credit: Elder Ordonez/INSTARimages
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- Red carpet for the SNL50: The Anniversary Show of ‘Saturday Night Live’ Featuring: Hilaria Baldwin Where: New York, New York, United States When: 16 Feb 2025 Credit: Janet Mayer/INSTARimages.com
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- SNL50: The anniversary show of ‘Saturday Night Live’ after party held at the Plaza Hotel Featuring: Alec Baldwin and Hilaria Baldwin Where: New York, United States When: 16 Feb 2025 Credit: Darla Khazei/INSTARimages
I am an anglophone who is fluent in French. I work in mostly French; I speak it for a good part of my day. I did the majority of own education in French, between ages 11-21. I have “belonged” to four countries and counting.
I have never spoken English with a French accent.
This.
I grew up and later went to school in several countries, in the US, UK, France, Spain, Colombia. Spanish people still detect a slight accent, and always ask me where it’s from, as I spent more time in Colombia.
I don’t have a conscious preference for either UK or US accents, it seems to depend where I am, or where the people I’m talking to are from.
My first language is German (my mother’s), but I don’t have e.g. a French accent in German.
Hilaria is such a sad, attention-starved liar, and I have no idea why her husband goes along with it.
Maybe they both like to pretend she’s Penélope Cruz. 🤷🏼♀️
Haha. I am now picturing Brenda Walsh on 90210 speaking English with a fake French accent to flirt with Dean Cain.
LMFAO! That is a perfect reference. He was a dumb college kid trying to get laid, otherwise he would have seen right through the ridiculous accent. Alec, OTOH…
This!
I’m bilingual Italian/English born in Italy who still speaks English with an Italian accent after decades. I have now got an English twang in Italian but it fizzles away after a week back in Italy.
She’s fooling no-one with this nonsense and I dare to say her defending her lies over and over again is what makes it offensive for me.
Chica is loca.
She is, how you say it, an idiot? Estúpida! Thank you.
I’m not sure why anyone is offended by Hilaria and her fake accent. Dorit from real housewives of Beverly Hills speaks in a fake English accent and so does Madonna. Big deal. There are worse things that people can do.
I’m French and I did all of my studies in English but I could never see myself talking with a British accent on a daily basis. I do get little gitches sometimes and I can’t find a word in French but most of the time I can’t find it in English either. When that happen I usually say “I’m not trying to do an Hillaria Baldwin and her cucumber, I promise !”
Also, my family would make so much fun of me that I wouldn’t recover from it if I were to start pretending to be British.
and I’m betting you also don’t just plop French words (that aren’t ones most Americans recognize as a commonly used phrase) to replace English when speaking with others who speak English to make it appear as though you need to use the French word because French is your primary language and you just can’t remember the English word as if that word is really foreign to you.
Also, she continues to lie she was not raised bilingual speaking Spanish and English. Wasn’t it confirmed that her family ties to Spain didn’t start until her brother was an exchange student in Spain when she was a teenager (in HS)?
Yes, exactly!! Sometimes I can’t find a word in French and obviously I have to resort to English. Sometimes if a word is rare in English but common in French, I reach for the French word when speaking English.
But I am not speaking English with a French accent, littering my English with French so I sound like un locuteur natif lol
Spanish is my native language. I learned English at 6 years old. I still speak fluent Spanish. I do not speak English with an accent. The issue is not her being bilingual. Everyone, including Hilaria, knows what the real issue with Hilaria’s “accent” is.. But nice attempt, Hilaria.
So stupid. She’s the one who is preventing herself from embracing her identity, which is a woman from Massachusetts who loves the Spanish language and culture.
No one is calling her out for that , we are calling her out for pretending to be Spanish when she is an American . We are calling her out for pretending that English is her second language and speaks it with a pretend accent
She’s mad.
In both senses of the word.
I read an article years ago where she once said her parents could not pronounce “Baldwin” and she mimicked their failed attempts (with exaggerated Spanish accents) to do so. Both of her parents were born and raised in the US and never even visited to Spain until adulthood and never studied Spanish in school. They never learned Spanish at all until moving there after retirement. So she definitely was not raised bilingual. I also saw the late-night interview with Alec where he outright said his wife is “from Spain” and mimicked her speaking with a Spanish accent. Later, after all of this was exposed he claimed she was educated “half in the US and half in Spain” but that is not true either. I know people who went to high school with her and she was never gone for half of the year. And her parents had jobs where they could never go off and live in Spain for half the year. I also saw an interview with Hillary years ago where she was asked where she is from and with the slightest hesitation she said “my family lives in Spain” which was true but only because this was after her parents had retired there. As intended, the interviewer took that to mean she was raised in Spain and complemented Hilary’s English and Hillary said that she went to NYU, implying that that is why her English is so good. She carefully worded that whole exchange to misleadingly imply she was Spanish without technically saying it. But nobody ever seems to ask her, “why did you once say your parents could not pronounce the name Baldwin?” or questions like that using specific examples of lies or misleading questions she is on record as having said. She is always allowed to put her spin on things without people confronting her directly with these many concrete examples of lies and exaggerations. I am so curious as to why this is the case.
This!!!
My guess is she idealizes the expat lifestyle (it’s a privileged one). It’s not enough for her to be some sort of minor celebrity by marriage. She wants the expat identity. She wants to feel wordly and “other”.
The thing is when you live that lifestyle, unless you’re wealthy, it’s not that glamourous. The thought of schlepping back and forth half the year in one country, half in another, gives me the hives.
And then of course, no one is talking about how the migrant workers picking their produce are “worldly” and “belonging to other places.” So much privilege and snobbery baked in to her weirdo POV.
Yes to all of that.
Also even the article continues the lie:
“ Hilaria said no public criticism will stop her from bringing her Spanish culture into their lives.”
It’s NOT her culture. Just stahhhhhp already.
I’m still curious when Alex realized she wasn’t actually from Spain. Before or after naming the kids?
That’s what fascinates me too. When did Alex find out and what is/was his reaction?
I cannot believe people really think that Alec’s people didnt do their research on her before he put on a ring on it. He knew she wasn’t Spanish early on. Dont coddle him
This question stuck with me…Alec must have met her parents and brother at some point before they got married, right? Not to mention other family members? Old friends? Unless her entire group of friends and family were acquiring accents and/ or made-up memories, he must have realized who she was at some point, married her and had lots of kids with her anyway. I’m trying to see her nuclear, non-Spanish or Latino heritage family adopting fake Spanish identities and accents along with Hilaria and failing miserably.
Hilary’s claim that she was bullied for speaking Spanish is both gaslighting and diabolical. In reality, she faced criticism and admonishment for deceiving people about her identity and falsifying her background. This behavior is not just dramatic – I consider it depraved.
People took offense the woman was getting covers of Latina magazine. When she does not have a drop of spanish in her. She is a WASP from Boston. That changed her name from Hillary to Hilaria at NYU (which I don’t even think she graduated from). But wants people to think she did.
That’s not bullying that’s taking accountability for lying and co-opting a country and culture that is not hers.
Larry is always full of it.
I remember when Alec spoke about her on Fallon or Kimmel (or was it Letterman?) before the truth had been revealed. They had been married for a while and he was gushing about his wife being Spanish and how her being Spanish was so charming, etc. Watching that clip years later, it’s clear she had him fully snowed, he had bought her nonsense hook, line and sinker. I’d wondered how she handled being so thoroughly outed for being a liar and here we have it! She’s just lying to herself now and making a million excuses b/c she’s nuts or trying to hang on to her wealthy lifestyle/husband.
I agree that she is not inauthentic. She is definitely authentically sick.
I am a native English speaker who can also speak Spanish and I don’t walk around with a fake accent or tell people I’m from Spain. But cool story, Hils.
So Hileria is a mess. But my takeaway from this story is that the rich white lady who was caught publicly lying now has a TV show while immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries who also speak with accents are being brutally deported and dumped across the border b/c they are a “threat to the country” Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
Yep. Too bad we don’t deport lying liars who lie.
Nah, in this country we don’t deport them, we give them a lucrative reality show. Or, elect them president.
In all the years she has been married to Baldwin and in the public eye (11? 12?) has she ever been to Spain? Has she taken him there to meet her parents? Has she taken her kids to experience the country she claims to love so much and be a part of? That’s what makes no sense to me (along with all the other craziness). If she loves that country so much why does she never visit especially if her family lives there….
But didn’t she get career opportunities, economic benefits by pretending to be ‘Spanish’? Magazine covers, spots on morning TV shows. This is where this becomes a huge problem.
A great example is…
Buffy St Claire (Saint Marie?) who was outed last year for pretending to a Canadian native for 60 years. She has a successful music career, tribal awards and accolades, that she never would have had without appropriating another culture.
Her interest in Spain seems to be to make herself seem ‘exotic’ in the US which she can afford to do as a rich white woman. She’s a fraud and that’s what people are calling out, her gaslighting does not change that.
English is my first language as my French mother was scared off from speaking to me in French as a baby because yay Britain in the 70’s so I speak French with a faint English accent (people often say they can hear something but not quite place it) and have never spoken English with a French accent.
Yes, people get bullied all the time for being bilingual! She is absolutely determined to gaslight everyone into believing she is the victim because she was caught in a huge LIE.
Alec Baldwin’s wife “Hilarious Baldwin” is an 🇺🇸 citizen who uses her privilege background to project a fake Spanish persona…
Richard Gere’s wife “Alejandra Silva”…uses her background of privilege to house homeless people in HER COUNTRY of Spain 🇪🇸 & works to make the 🌎 a better place …
There IS a difference
What accent does she use calling those kids to dinner?
Leonardo! Raphael! Romeo! Se sirve la cena!
Its so nice to hear that no one is buying this
I live in Montana, which is home to a large population of Natives. Living here and knowing some of the language does not make me Native, and never will.
I can remember reading about their marriage and having her described as a chilled out yoga teacher from Spain who had no interest in Alec’s fame and just wanted a big family! Well the last part was certainly true!
I wasn’t paying close attention, but I definitely thought Alec was married to a woman from Spain until this broke.
Off the subject, but that dress is awful. Are the boobs fake too?
Absolutely fake. As usual, she lied and said they got big because she quit swimming or some such nonsense.
I love this story so much lol. I grew up bilingual speaking English and French in the US, my dad is from France. I went to a bilingual French-American school in the US. I don’t speak English with a French accent lol (my dad does obviously!). I can do for funsies an exaggerated American accent speaking French, it used to make my mom laugh when I was a kid. And I know for a fact I have a very small accent when I do speak French, it’s been pointed out to be my native French speakers which makes sense since I didn’t grow up in France. I’m very self aware unlike Hilaria Baldwin lol.
I also lived in Spain for two years and I didn’t return with a Spanish accent. I would sometimes inject a French intonation when I spoke Spanish because the French accent is way closer to Spanish pronunciation than the American accent is. I wasn’t trying to fake anything, it was for pronunciation purposes and it’s my natural accent when I speak French. I would also translate from French to Spanish in my head because the French sentence structure is much closer to the Spanish one and it worked about 99% of the time (though very exhausting!). Spanish people would sometimes comment on it but it would come and go because I wasn’t always trying to default to my French accent when I spoke Spanish.
I watched the Baldwin tv trailer and Hillary (refusing to call her Hilaria) is STILL doing her fake Spanish accent. It’s not as strong as before and only pops up here and there but omg. Why they would do this show after Alec killed Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust, I have no idea. And she’s still shilling the “I grew up in two cultures.” NO, you didn’t. I actually grew up in two cultures. I even did MATH IN FRENCH in elementary school (in fact I didn’t even do math in English until 9th grade, true story). Come back to me once you learned how to do long division in Spanish! Then we’ll talk.
lol my son is doing math in French in elementary school. He’s still anglophone.
The whole thing reminds me of when I was 11 and would spend summers in this extremely backwoods area where people had the world’s strongest accent because it was so rural and relatively poor. I would imitate their accents because it seemed cool (you want to fit in!), then I’d talk to my mom over the phone in the same accent and she’d remark on it and I felt so COOOOOL and SPEEEECIALLL.
I stopped doing that when I was 12.
Her behavior is literally a recurring nightmare i’ve had for years. I grew up abroad, I’m fluent in a few languages, and I wake up every so often feeling anxious and terrible because in my dream I was living my life speaking with an accent of a country that’s not mine, forced to commit to the acting and fraud of constant pretense. Her life gives me anxiety.
Do we have any psychiatrists here? This level of delusion has to be some kind of medical condition.
This sure seems like some kind of pathology, doesn’t it? What kind of person does this? The attention-seeking is off the charts with this woman!
I lived and worked in Mexico for 3 years, spoke Spanish well, but I never pepper my English with Spanish words, and I never speak English with a Mexican accent. Ella es llena de mierda. That dress is doing nothing for her other than show-casing her implants BTW.
Are we sure she didn’t graduate from Trump university “alternate facts 101” class?
I was born, raised, and still live in New York. I spent a school year in Spain as an exchange student in high school. I’ve been back a bunch of times, my host sister has been here a bunch of times. I am fluent in Spanish. My accent is Spanish (when im speaking Spanish only). Sometimes I’ll throw a Spanish word in my sentence if I think it is better than the English word.
I am not Spanish. I do not have red spanish culture lol.
(I did appropriate it though,when Kiddo was very young and wouldn’t take naps. I told him wouldn’t it be fun to take a siesta like Abuelita – what he calls my host mom – in the afternoon? It worked)
My American aunt who moved to Germany in the 70’s can forget English words from time to time, but she is also in Germany speaking German most of the time. She also doesn’t have a German accent when speaking English.
My cousins, her daughter, grew up in Germany speaking English and German and lives in Austria now barely has a German accent when speaking English.
People’s issue with Hilaria is not “speaking two languages “ ( I would be interested in seeing how well she actually speaks Spanish) but in pretending to be from somewhere else and overemphasizing her fake accent to the point of caricature.
She loves Spanish and attention so much she’s cosplaying it.
We have bigger things to worry about
Real question though, is she done having children?
I’m not saying anything about her follow up lies but I can speak to growing up in the US and now speaking English with ‘an accent’. Lupita Nuyongo did a really beautiful interview with Trevor Noah on her accent journey. I too could practice and intentionally try to go back to my American accent but why? To make others comfortable? Look I was a typical 80s 90s kid in some ways, daycare before and after school and then a single mother who was tired from working and commuting but in other ways it was not so typical… my dad was married to someone else (I’m an affair baby) and then died when I was 9 years old. My Mom didn’t have cable my entire life so I grew up with 3 tv channels, we had no house phone until after my dad died and people had no way of contacting us plus I became a latchkey kid so I think it was a safety thing to have a phone. Moved from Delaware valley area up to New England when I was in high school, finished hs and college in New England. In college I met my husband who is African Caribbean and my social hours were spent with him and other international college students. Moved to the Caribbean for ten years and during that time was very poor on a small island of 200 people with a ferry to main island 3x per week, no internet and no phone for most of that, I had a debit card looking thing I could reload and put in one pay phone I could walk to to call my mom occasionally and say hi and later give updates on her grandbaby. I came back to the US with a small child and apparently an accent. It’s not intentional, it’s not put on , it’s what I hear in my head and what comes out when I speak. Mostly people think I’m maybe latina sometimes Polish/Czech but when I was in the US Virgin Islands recently people there instantly assumed I was from there. My current husband is from another country which is Hindi speaking. Idk what to say, lilt and rhythm and accent make a difference for others to understand us in different parts of the world and my accent sometimes reflects that if I am speaking with people who have non Englishfirst languages. Listening to Lupita I stopped wanting to try to work on it and sound more… what? NJish, New Englandish, which one do I choose and intentionally try to mimick now? Idk when I spend time talking with fam who never left PA NJ area that accent comes out more but that’s not very often.
For those of you who learned and spoke other languages but have only ever spoken English with your specific American accent ok good for you, it doesn’t make it impossible for others to naturally speak English with a different language when having spoken English with lots of people from different places. That’s all I’m saying, the lies to backtrack it and whatever else is going on that borders on fetishism is another part of this that I’m not really commenting on, just the accent part.
One thing I’ll say about this thread is that people are sharing unbelievably fascinating life stories. Thank you for sharing yours.
Accents and words are one thing. I taught ESL for many years and adopted a certain way of speaking. Or I moved back to where I’m from and started sounding like that again.
The problem with Hilaria is that she doesn’t live in Spain. She’s not from Spain. She just takes occasional trip there, but she’s made it her entire identity. That’s the weird part. Imagine if you sounded like you were from the Virgin Islands after taking a couple trips there? It would be weird.
I had a friend who went to London for 10 months then spoke with a British accent for 3 years after she returned. People sideeye that.
I am, how you say, tired of this woman!
She IS inauthentic though for faking her Spanish accent, for changing her English name, and for pretending to not know the English word for cucumber … and for that hideous boob job.
Exactly!
I will never not find Hilaria hilarious. And I do so wish that they had called just one of those children Bob or Bryan or something. He could be the one who leaned more heavily into his Anglo / US “identity”. (Disclaimer: I am half Portuguese and half English and people are always surprised when they find out about the Portuguese part.)
The worst was that “teaching moment” video she made about racism to her kids, using her own tanned arm as the example of an oppressed POC.