Hilaria Baldwin, author and wife of actor Alec Baldwin, took to Instagram over the weekend to address online controversy over her heritage, accent and Spanish name.
In a video posted to Instagram on Sunday, Baldwin said she was born in Boston and “grew up” in Massachusetts and in Spain speaking both Spanish and English.
She said she and her husband are trying to raise their children in a bilingual household.
“I tend to mix them,” Baldwin said of the Spanish and English languages. “That’s just something that I’ve always been a little insecure about.”
“When I was growing up in this country, I would use the name Hillary, and in Spain I would use the name Hilaria, and my family, like my parents, call me Hilaria, my whole family call me Hilaria,” she said.
“A handful of years before I met Alec I decided to consolidate the two,” she said, “and I identify more with Hilaria, because that’s what my family calls me.”
“Whatever you guys want to call me I will respond to both,” she said.
However, Baldwin’s profile with the Casting Agency of America says she “was born in Mallorca, Spain and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.”
A public records search shows that Hilaria Baldwin was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas and was registered to vote under that name in New York through at least 2008.
In the past week, several Twitter users posted long chains of video clips showing Baldwin developing and losing a Spanish accent.
In one 2015 “TODAY” show appearance publicized in the last week, Baldwin apparently forgot the English word for cucumber.
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In a 2020 podcast interview publicized online, Baldwin said, “I moved here when I was 19 to go to NYU.”
“From?” one of the interviewers asked Baldwin.
“From? My family lives in Spain, they live in Mallorca,” Baldwin responded.
However, Baldwin did write on her own Twitter account in 2012 that she was born in Boston.
A spokesperson for Baldwin directed reporters to the video she shared on Instagram and declined further comment.
Hilaria’s husband Alec also posted a video Sunday labeled “Consider the source…” with meandering thoughts about “venom” and “hate” of social media, “pizzagate” and “Epstein.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
