Hilaria Baldwin’s defense: ‘I’mLivingMy Life’

The first signs that Hilaria Baldwin’s lifewas going seriously off the rails camefrom the same place where she usually derives her sense of control. “I started seeing comments onmy Instagram,” she said in an interview Dec. 29.

“It’s a very strange thing and you can just be living your life,” she said, when suddenly comments begin to mount suggesting that you, a famous person who has shared somuch of yourself with your hundreds of thousands of followers, are notwho they thought you to be, and you find your very identity the subject of international debate and skepticism.

Over the last two weeks or so, millions of people, cooped up and tired and probably too online at the end of the year, have been surprisedtolearn that Hilaria Baldwin, 36 and the mother of five children with her husband, the actor Alec Baldwin, is not a Spaniard but an Americanwhowas born and raised in Boston and who was known, at least until 2009, as Hillary.

“It’s very surreal,” said Baldwin, who said she had been called Hilaria by family membersfor most ofher life. “There is not something I’m doingwrong, andIthinkthere is a difference between hidingandcreating aboundary.”

For days now, the internet and the news media have dogged her, sharing evidence of Baldwin speaking in a Spanish accent in this video but not that one, of fluffy magazine spreads in ¡Hola! that cite her as a native Spanish speaker, of a “Today” show clip showing her making gazpacho and asking Telemundo’s Evi Siskowhat the Englishword for cucumbers is and of a biography posted on the website of Creative Artists Agency, the talent organization, that said shewas born in Mallorca, Spain.

Baldwin is bilingual, and she speaks English with varying degrees of a Spanishaccentdependingonhow happy or upset she is feeling, shesaid. Shedidn’tknowthat ¡Hola! magazine, for which she has twice posed for the cover andwhich has written

Hilaria andAlec Baldwin at theUnited States Tennis Association’s opening night gala at the Billie Jean KingNational Tennis Center onAug. 26, 2019. Accused of a “decade long griftwhere she impersonates a Spanish person,” the entrepreneur and spouse of Alec Baldwin has been themain character of the lastweek of 2020. some 20 items about her on its English-languagewebsite so far this year, repeatedly reported inaccurately that shewas a Spaniard because she said she didn’t read articles about herself. She got confused about the word for cucumber because itwas one of her first times appearing on live television and she was nervous (“brain fart,” she said).

As for the CAA bio, she can only assume the agency used unverified information from the internet to write a sloppy bio. “I rarely at all work with CAA now,” she said. “It was very disappointing.” (A spokesperson for ¡Hola! declined to comment. A spokesperson for CAA declined to comment.)

But all these misconceptions are why she agreed to speak to a reporter for 80 minutes as she cuddled and nursed her infant son. “Today we have an opportunity to clarify for people who have been confused — and have been confused in some ways by people misrepresenting me.”

“One of the most important places to start is this idea of boundaries,” said Baldwin, whoinvites socialmedia followers into her home life with Alec Baldwin and their five fair-haired young children by routinely sharing images like her underwearcladworkout routines, innumerable pregnancy selfies and the sponsored diaperad videos of her infant son.

The trouble began for Baldwin on Dec. 21. That is when awomanwho uses the Twitter handle @Lenibriscoe (like the “Law & Order” character Lennie Briscoe, get it?) decided to answer her pandemic holiday ennui by thumb-typing out something that had beenonher mind. “Youhave to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person,” the woman wrote.

Shewent on to post about the accent inconsistencies, clips showing the decidedly non-Spanish, entirely New England establishment bona fides of Baldwin’s parents and the unfortunate cucumber moment. She said that Baldwin’s American upbringing was an open secret among many people in New York and she just decided tomake it less secret.

“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 someonewho gets so much media attention,” said the woman, who was granted anonymity by The New York Times because she said shewas scared that Alec Baldwin, who agreed to take an anger management course in 2019 in order todispose of charges after a fight with a man over a parking spot and has been arrested, escorted from a plane and suspended from a job as an MSNBC host, all in the last decade, would punch her. (A spokesperson for Alec Baldwin declined to comment.)

“The things I have shared aboutmyself are very clear,” Baldwin said. “Iwas born in Boston. I spent time in Boston and in Spain. My family now lives in Spain. Imoved 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. Andnowit seems like it’s not enough.”

Spain is a country long loved by her parents, David L. Thomas Jr., who practiced real estate lawforwhite shoe firms, and Dr. Kathryn Hayward, a retired internal medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Through a spokesperson for Baldwin, Thomas and Hayward declined to comment.

Spain “was something that was part ofmy father’s childhood,” Baldwin said. “He would go therewhen hewas younger and created these deep, deep, deep bonds and it was something that was part ofmy childhood. Itwas something my father introduced to my mother when they met, when they were pretty young.”

Baldwin first visited Spain with her parents when she was a baby, she said, and she went at least yearly thereafter. She declined to explain in detail howfrequently they traveled there or how long they stayed. “I think itwould be maddening to do such a tight time line of everything. You know, sometimes there was school involved. Sometimes itwas vacation. Itwas such a mix, mishmash, is that the right word? Like a mix of different things.”

When the family visited Spain, they spent much of their time in Madrid, Seville and Valencia, she said.

When they were at home in Boston, Baldwin said, the family spoke Spanish and cooked Spanish food. Family friends fromSpainwould often live with theHaywardThomases for extended stays when visiting the United States. “When we weren’t in Spain, we called it ‘we brought Spain into our home,’” she said.

Baldwin’s older brother, Jeremy, moved to Mallorca, a Spanish island in theMediterranean. Thomas andHayward moved there as well in 2011.

These experiences explain why the Spanish language, culture, food and traditional danceare soimportant toher identity, she said, and she and Alec Baldwin are working to recreate this for their children. “I send them to a bilingual school where they have Spanish in school and I speak to them in Spanish at home.” After the pandemic, shesaid, sheandherhusband plan tospendmore time with their children in Mallorca.

“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.’”

She said she didn’t think that her referring in online posts to her travel to Spain as “going home” was misleading. “Home iswheremy 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.’” (Though she has said her family has roots in Spain, she said she was speaking colloquially. “These peoplewho I callmy family,

I amlearning in this particular situation, I have to say, ‘People who we have considered to be our family.’”)

Shesaid shedidnot believe her storywas one that bears any connection to cultural appropriation because, she said, as much as American culture has shaped her, so too has the culture of Spain: “Who is to say what you’re allowed to absorb and not absorb growing up?”

“This hasbeena partofmy whole life,” she said, “and I can’t make it go away just because some people don’t understand it.”

Baldwin’s name change especially iswhat confounds peoplewho knewher in her Hillary years. “The whole ‘Hilaria’ thing is hilarious to me,” said AlexanderRechits, whowas Baldwin’s competitivedancepartnerfrom2006 until 2009 and who now is the founder of AVR Dynamics, a business and marketing consultancy.

When they danced the rumba and the cha-cha in events like the New York Dance Festival and the MIT Open, he knew her as HillaryHayward-Thomas. Sometime after she and Rechits stopped dancing together, Baldwin took on the Spanish-inspired version of her given name.

“I understandwhy she did it,” said Rechits, who said that Baldwin was a kind, caring and talented person. “It was always her desire to be considered Spanish. She had roots in Spain, her brother lived there, she visited there a lot. But Hillary is a very good strong name, so why would you change that when you were born here and you weren’t born in Spain?”

“I have a lot of nicknames in Russian,” said Rechits, whoimmigratedtoNewYork from Belarus. “But I’m still Alexander everywhere I go.”

Baldwinsaid that as shegot older, she wanted to choose one version of her name, and she chose Hilaria. And for her, it all comes back to the idea of boundaries.

“You are entitled to your privacy,” she said, of all of us on the internet. “I am entitled tomy privacy. People say, ‘No, you’re not entitled to your privacy because you married a famous personandyouhave Instagram.’ Well, that’s not really true.”