Hilaria Baldwin, wife of actor Alec Baldwin, has been the subject of controversy this week as she faces accusations from across the internet that she’s been faking a Spanish accent and falsely claiming to have been born in Mallorca, Spain.
In the wake of all this drama, the author, yoga instructor, and podcaster has clarified that she was, in fact, born in Boston, Massachusetts, and that she does identify as “a white girl” — with the caveat that “Europe has a lot of white people” and “ethnically I am a mix of many, many, many things.” She has also copped to the fact that she was born Hilary Thomas, but says she decided to “consolidate” the two names when she married Alec.
Over the years, Baldwin has also said that she first moved to the U.S. from Spain when she was 19 to study at NYU, and that she has Spanish parents. But others claim to have gone to high school with her in Massachusetts, and her parents appear to have only moved to Spain as recently as 2011.
As Oprah once asked, “So what is the truth?” For your viewing pleasure, we’ve compiled a collection of seven times Baldwin slipped out of her Spanish accent and into regular American white-girl-speak.
One of the most circulated clips is this ABC interview from 2012, shortly after her wedding to Alec Baldwin. In the clip, she lays the Spanish accent on pretty thick but seems to slip in and out of it at the start of sentences.
This “Extra” interview from earlier that same year also features a lot of confusing back-and-forth accent switching. Listen to how she says, “And I don’t remember the rest because I started crying” at the 16-second mark, and then how different she sounds at the 50-second mark when she says “With us, everything is — we talk about everything. We don’t have secrets.”
Then, of course, there is the infamous “Today” cooking segment in which she sports an even heavier Spanish accent and seems to forget how to say the word “cucumber” in English.
But in this 2018 “Today” interview with Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager, she ditches the accent altogether and sounds like just another suburban mom from Massachusetts.
Here she is again in 2016 with husband Alec and two of their children, Carmen Gabriela and Rafael Thomas, discussing what they should name their third child (they ended up going with Leonardo Angel Charles, and later added Romeo Alejandro David and Eduardo Pau Lucas). But in the clip, her Spanish accent is, again, nowhere to be found.
In this Elle video from 2019, she mostly favors the American accent but occasionally throws in some slight Spanish pronunciations.
Even in her Instagram video from this Sunday, in which she attempts to explain herself, she speaks predominantly with an American accent but still annunciated words like “really” with noticeably Spanish diction.
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