The last drama of the wild year that was 2020 might just be the most outrageous yet. It all started on Sunday, when comedian Amy Schumer made a joke on Instagram, posting a postpartum photo of Hilaria Baldwin, wife of actor Alec Baldwin, holding her three-month-old baby while wearing lingerie. Schumer was making light of the fact that Baldwin looks like a Sports Illustrated model mere months after giving birth to her fifth child. But Baldwin didn’t see the humor in it. In fact, not long after, she took to Instagram to share an Instagram Live in response, calling for “body inclusivity” and saying that the movement also needs to include women who look like her. But in the heat of the moment, Baldwin forgot to speak in the Spanish accent she’d been allegedly putting on for close to a decade, kicking off a frenzy which has resulted in people finding out the yoga instructor is, in fact, not from Spain, as she’s claimed multiple times in the past, but she was born in Boston, USA. Oh, and her name isn’t Hilaria, it’s Hillary.
“You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade-long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person,” Twitter user @lenibriscoe commented on Monday, beginning a long thread which has since gone viral and resulted in stories such as The Daily Mail’s deep-dive into the Baldwin wedding, titled: “Inside Hilaria and Alec Baldwin’s NYC wedding where they said ‘Sí,’ waved flamenco fans and exchanged Cartier rings inscribed in Spanish – before she told Vanity Fair that her family ‘couldn’t pronounce her new surname.’” There’s also the clip where Baldwin says she can’t remember the English name for a ‘cucumber.’ Just when you thought you’d seen it all…
As Page Six notes, Baldwin’s bio on her agency’s speaker site states: “Baldwin was born in Mallorca, Spain and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.” In a 2018 profile, Hola! magazine describes her as “born in Spain,” speaking Spanish as her native language and, just this year, in an April interview on the MomTruths podcast, Baldwin said that she “moved here when [she] was 19 to go to NYU.” Asked where she’d moved from, Baldwin answered: “From — my family lives in Spain, they live in Mallorca.”
In response to the drama, the Baldwins have come out swinging. Alec, for his part, uploaded a rather creepy video of himself repeating the words “consider the source” while refusing to mention his wife’s name or the country of Spain (people in the comments quickly pointed out that Hilaria, for the most part, is the source), while Hilaria herself provided a long list of defenses, such as her parents owning a holiday home in Spain and flying the children there for their entire childhood, before later relocating to Spain (Hilaria continued living in the USA but would visit her family for month-long stints).
Now Baldwin has done an interview with the New York Times, in another attempt to “clarify” that, despite speaking in a Spanish accent for the past decade, it’s us who’d gotten the wrong end of the stick.
Baldwin claims that she has always been upfront about growing up in Boston, and that she is not to blame for all the information saying otherwise. As for that aforementioned ¡Hola! Magazine profile, Baldwin says she doesn’t read interviews she’s done, so didn’t see it to correct the record. Baldwin says she first visited Spain when she was a baby and says she returned at least once every ensuing year, however, she declines to specify how much time she cumulatively spent there. “I think it would be maddening to do such a tight timeline of everything,” she explained. “You know, sometimes there was school involved. Sometimes it was vacation. It was such a mix, mishmash, is that the right word? Like a mix of different things.”
Mmmhmm.
