Hilaria Baldwin has blamed the media for ‘misrepresenting’ her as Spanish and says this is why people are now ‘confused’ about her heritage – and claims she has done nothing wrong.
Attempting to stem the backlash she’s faced after being accused of a decade-long ‘Spanish grift’, the influencer and wife of Alec Baldwin gave an 80-minute cringe-worthy interview with the New York Times to ‘clarify’ her story.
However, during the course of the interview the mother-of-five, 36, reveals yet more contradictions about her heritage as she attempts to claims she has always been honest about being from Boston.
The influencer says she ‘hid’ her Bostonian heritage so as to protect her parents from media scrutiny after she began dating Alec Baldwin – who she says has always known she is from New England.
Hilaria also attempts to explain away the now infamous Today cooking segment where she she ‘forgot’ the word for cucumber and claims it was because she had a ‘brain fart’.
And she also denies she is guilty of cultural appropriation and that she ever tried to pretend she was Spanish at any time.
Hilaria Baldwin (pictured with husband Alec) has claimed she is guilty of no wrongdoing after being accused of pulling off a ‘decade-long grift’ to pass herself off as a Spanish person
The downfall of Hilaria’s apparent grift came on December 21 when a Twitter user under the handle @Lenibriscoe began a thread in which she highlighted her faltering Spanish accent and revealed her New England upbringing.
‘We’re all bored and it’s just seemed so strange to me that no one had ever come out and said it, especially for someone who gets so much media attention,’ the unnamed woman told the Times.
The woman said that it was an open secret in New York that Hilaria had an American upbringing, yet she wishes to remain anonymous over fears that husband Alec Baldwin ‘would punch her’.
The actor was forced to take an anger management course last year after a fight with a man over a parking spot.
He has also previously been escorted from a plane after refusing to stop playing popular game ‘Words with Friends’ and turn off his cell phone.
Hilaria had initially denied the allegations stating that it was only ‘Fake Twitter accounts accusing me of a fake identity!’ yet was later forced to back down and reveal more about her Massachusetts background after thousands of comments.
‘Yes, I am a white girl. I am a white girl. Let’s be very clear that Europe has a lot of white people in there and my family is white,’ she said in an Instagram video on Sunday.
‘Ethnically, I am a mix of many, many, many things. Culturally, I grew up with two cultures so it’s really as simple as that.’
Hilaria said that she is a bilingual speaker and claimed that she speaks English in varying degrees of a Spanish accent depending on her emotions at the time, in response to the numerous videos showcasing her changing accent.
She alleges that she did not know that magazine ¡Hola! had written that she is Spanish as she does not read pieces about herself.
And claims that talent organization Creative Artists Agency must have pulled their bio that states she was born in Mallorca, Spain, from the internet without fact checking.
‘I rarely at all work with C.A.A. now,’ she said. ‘It was very disappointing.’
One of the most joked about incidents over the past week has been the ‘Today Show’ appearance in which she asked for the English word for cucumber, which she says was because she was confused.
‘The things I have shared about myself are very clear,’ Hilaria said.
‘I was born in Boston. I spent time in Boston and in Spain. My family now lives in Spain. I moved to New York when I was 19 years old and I have lived here ever since.
‘For me, I feel like I have spent 10 years sharing that story over and over again. And now it seems like it’s not enough.’
This new timeline leaves ambiguity over her move to New York and whether she arrived there from Spain, as previously claimed, or from another part of the US.
She could also not tell the Times exactly how much time she had spent in Spain when she was younger.
‘I think it would be maddening to do such a tight time line of everything,’ she said.
‘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.’
‘When we weren’t in Spain, we called it “we brought Spain into our home”,’ she added.
There is no evidence to show that she ever attended school in Spain.
Hillary Thomas-Hayward officially became Hilaria Baldwin when she wed husband Alec, with tributes to her claimed Spanish roots, with the bride wearing a mantilla-inspired veil, cooling herself with a flamenco hand fan and nuptial readings in both English and Spanish
Hilaria incorporated several elements Spanish culture in her 175-guest wedding in June 2012, recently noting in her explanation about her background that 44 people flew in from Spain
Hilaria says that her own upbringing with emphasis on Spanish culture is why she is now so determined to recreate the same for her fiver children, pictured above
Hilaria now states that she first visited Spain as a baby and the family made frequent trips after that.
She has previously spoken only of going to Mallorca, where her parents and older brother now live, yet now claims that they spent much of their time in Madrid, Seville and Valencia.
Hilaria states that they still spoke Spanish and cooked Spanish food when at home in Boston and that her family had always called her Hilaria, despite everyone else knowing her as Hilary until at least 2009.
30 Rock actor Alec had rushed to his wife’s defense when the barrage of social media comments began to come in this week questioning whether she had lied about her background.
‘Fake? Exaggerated? Appropriated an accent as an adult? She lived in Spain for many years as a child. She lived both places,’ he responded to a Twitter critic.
Hilaria said in Wednesday’s interview that she had never told her husband that she was from Spain, despite his now infamous 2013 Letterman interview in which Alec had claimed she is Spanish.
‘My wife is from Spain,’ the 62-year-old had said.
‘I walked by him,’ Hilaria told the Times of meeting Alec in a vegan restaurant in 2011.
‘He said, “Where are you from?” And I said, “I’m from Boston.” That was the first thing I said, that has always been my narrative.’
She also answered back to people who have criticized her for referring to Spain as home, when she has not revealed how much time she has truely spent there.
‘Home is where my parents are going to be,’ she said. ‘If my parents move to China, I am going to go to China and say, “I’m going home”.’
‘These people who I call my family, I am learning in this particular situation, I have to say, “People who we have considered to be our family”.)’
Hilaria added that she believed herself steeped in two cultures through her family’s vacations there and that Spain had been a massive part of her father’s childhood.
Alec Baldwin, a three-time Emmy winner, is reportedly well known for his hot temper among the Hollywood elite (Pictured: An angry Alec fights with a photographer in New York, 2013)
Alec Baldwin is seen the above images shoving a reporter (left) as he walked to get his haircut in NYC, and screaming at a photographer in Beverly Hills (right) in May 2016
‘He would go there when he was younger and created these deep, deep, deep bonds and it was something that was part of my childhood,’ Hilaria claims.
‘It was something my father introduced to my mother when they met, when they were pretty young.’
Hilaria had left her parents off her 2012 wedding announcement because she claims she was trying to shield them from the press attention that would come from marrying a celebrity.
She says that she also purposefully avoided sharing details on her upbringing for the same reason.
Yet she once told Vanity Fair España her Spanish parents had difficulty pronouncing her married surname.
Hialria’s parents Dr Kathyrn Hayword and David Thomas have deep ties in the US
‘Where does something stop being your story and start being someone else’s?’ she asked.
‘You are entitled to your privacy. I am entitled to my privacy. People say, “No, you’re not entitled to your privacy because you married a famous person and you have Instagram.” Well, that’s not really true.’
Hilaria says that her own upbringing with emphasis on Spanish culture is why she is now so determined to recreate the same for her children, sending them to a bilingual school, speaking Spanish at home, and planning to spend more time with her family in Mallorca after the pandemic.
‘My family, this is where they’ve decided to spend their lives,’ she said.
‘I guarantee you they are going to live there and they are going to die there. That’s their home and that’s because this is not something new, no one put a map up on the wall and threw a dart at it and said, “Oh, Spain sounds good”.’
Hilaria has long described her mother as Spanish, yet records revealed that Dr Kathyrn Hayword is in fact a fourth-generation Massachusetts resident.
Both she and husband David Thomas worked as professors in the US for years before retiring to Majorca in 2011, according to Page Six.
Hilaria’s father’s family has even deeper ties to the US, having lived here since before the American Revolution.
On Wednesday, DailyMail.com exclusively revealed that Hilaria grew up in a 100-year-old $4million house in the heart of the most desirable district in Boston.
Records show her parents bought the five-bed, five-bath house on Pinckney Street in June 1987 when their daughter was just three years old.
They didn’t move out till she had turned 28, despite her claims of long periods of time spent in Spain.
‘I don’t know what she is talking about,’ said the family’s former neighbor. ‘She lived here since she was a child. She didn’t call herself Hilaria then – just Hillary. And she certainly didn’t speak with a Spanish accent.
‘Once I was really upset with her and asked her to shut the gate to stop the dog getting out and she just looked at me and said: “I’ve lived here for 19 years,” and stormed away.
‘She was a very entitled young lady.’
DailyMail.com can reveal that she grew up in this 100-year-old $4million house in the heart of the most desirable district in Boston called Beacon Hill
Her parents bought the five-bed, five-bath house in June 1987 when their daughter was just three years old and didn’t move out till she had turned 28
The neighbor said she knew that Hillary’s brother Jeremy had gone to Majorca on a school exchange trip and that is when the family started to fall in love with the island, which lies 130 miles from mainland Spain.
‘I didn’t really know them that well, but I know Jeremy tried to live in Spain for a while, but he felt he didn’t fit in, so came back, but then their parents decided to move there after they retired.’
Beacon Hill is regularly praised as the best area to live in Boston with its quaint narrow cobblestone streets and gas lighting and its closeness to both the Charles River and Boston Common.
Former secretary of state John Kerry lives a quarter-mile from the house Hilaria grew up in, while Ghislaine Maxwell’s husband Scott Borgerson’s townhouse is even closer.
Unlike most houses in Beacon Hill, Hilaria’s childhood home is set back from the street behind its own brick-tiled courtyard.
Her parents sold it for $2 million in 2012 but it has almost doubled in value to an estimated $3.95 million today, according to the real estate website Redfin.
When they sold, Thomas, now 71, and Hayward, 64, listed the white-painted house, built in 1899, as a ‘rare opportunity to live in a magnificent, private, single-family 5+ bedroom residence on Beacon Hill.’