Hilaria Baldwin addressed some lingering questions over her name, accent, and professed Spanish heritage over the weekend after a Twitter user sparked an online investigation last week, writing, “You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.”
In a 2018 cover interview, the yoga instructor told Hola! magazine that she was born in Spain and “has made certain to raise her children with her native language, Spanish.” Her biography on her agency’s website also claims, “Baldwin was born in Mallorca, Spain and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.” She also regularly speaks with a Spanish accent and during a cooking segment on the Today show seemed to forget the English word for cucumber.
However, in response to the viral tweet calling her Spanish ancestry into question, a number of people claiming to be Hilaria’s former high school classmates came forward to clarify that her name is, in fact, Hillary Hayword-Thomas, she grew up in Massachusetts, and while she’s a very nice girl, she is not Spanish. Hilaria told the podcast “Motherhood, Marriage & Miscarriages” in April that she moved to New York from Spain when she was 19 to attend NYU. However, she is also listed as a notable alumnus on the Wikipedia page for the Cambridge School of Weston in Weston, Massachusetts. Both her parents, Dr. Kathryn Hayword and David Thomas, do currently reside in Mallorca after moving there in 2011. One Twitter user, who describes herself as a professional genealogist, claimed that after doing a “quick and dirty tree” of Baldwin’s maternal ancestry, she “found English, Irish, French Canadian, German, and Slovak. Some deep New England roots. No Spain in sight.” The obituary for Hilaria’s paternal grandfather, David Thomas Sr., also states that his “family presence in that part of Vermont pre-dated the American Revolution.”
On Sunday, Hilaria addressed the speculation over her ancestry on Instagram, posting a video in which she explains, “I spent some of my childhood in Boston, some of my childhood in Spain, my family, my brother, my parents, my nephew, everybody is over there in Spain now, I’m here.” She added that she grew up speaking both English and Spanish in the home and her changing accent is because “I am that person, if I’ve been speaking a lot of Spanish, I tend to mix them or if I’m speaking a lot of English, I mix that, it’s one of those things I’ve always been a bit insecure about.” As for her name, “When I was growing up, in this country I would use the name Hillary, and in Spain I would use Hilaria and my family, my parents, call me Hilaria,” she says. After meeting her husband, she decided to “consolidate” things under the name Hilaria. “Yes I am a white girl, my family is white…Europe has a lot of white people in them. Ethnically I am a mix of many, many things.” She added, “I care because my thing is about being authentic and then if people say I’m not being authentic, it hurts my feelings…I don’t really understand why it’s turning into such a big thing…I’m getting attacked for being who I am…people wanting to label me Spanish or America, can’t it be both? It’s frustrating that is my story.”
Hilaria’s husband, actor Alec Baldwin, shared his own lengthy Instagram video in response to the speculation around his wife’s heritage, saying, “We live in a world now where we’re hidden behind the anonymity of social media. People feel that they can say anything. They can say anything. They probably would like to do anything if they weren’t at risk of getting caught and going to prison. Because they can’t do that, because that involves real commitment to do something, to express those feelings, they say things, no profile picture very often, sometimes yes, no identifying features there, hidden behind the anonymity of social media, they want to just shoot it all over you and spray it all over you, their venom and their hate….And you have to consider the source. There’s things that have been said lately about people that I love, that I care about deeply, which are ridiculous. I mean, just ridiculous.”
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