Hilaria Baldwin has claimed she is guilty of no wrongdoing and that misreprestention in the media is the reason why people were ‘confused’ and thought she was Spanish.
The 36-year-old attempted to answer the backlash she’s faced after being accused of decade-long ‘Spanish grift’ by giving an 80-minute interview with a friend at the New York Times.
She claims that she spoke little of her Boston upbringing as she hoped to protect her parents after her marriage to Alec and hit out at the media claiming they had failed to fact check that she wasn’t born in Spain.
Hilaria alleged that she had always been clear about where she was from despite revealing further contradications in her story, and failing to give details on how much time she spent in Spain growing up.
The mother of five also spoke on the now notorious ‘Today Show’ segment in which she asked what the English word for cucumber was, alleging she suffered from a ‘brain fart’ due to live TV nerves.
‘There is not something I’m doing wrong, and I think there is a difference between hiding and creating a boundary,’ she told the Times.
‘Today we have an opportunity to clarify for people who have been confused — and have been confused in some ways by people misrepresenting me.’
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 apparant 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.’
Yet in her interview with the Times, published on Wednesday after an 80-minute chat the previous day, she remained adamant that she was not guilty of cultural appropriation and that she had never tried to mispresent herself.
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.
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.