Hilaria Baldwin clarifies she was born in Boston after accusations she was ‘faking’ Spanish heritage

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After a slew of accusations she ‘faked’ her Spanish heritage, Hilaria Baldwin confessed Sunday that her real name is Hillary and she was actually born in Boston, not Majorca.

‘Yes, I am a white girl. I am a white girl,’ the 36-year-old influencer admitted in a rambling seven-minute video.

‘Let’s be very clear that Europe has a lot of white people in there and my family is white. 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 posted the video days after claims that she’s spent years misrepresenting her heritage went viral on Twitter, alongside a string of videos presented as evidence that her Spanish accent isn’t real. 

Several former classmates came forward to confirm that Hilaria was in fact raised in Weston, Massachusetts, by professor parents without a hint of a foreign accent.   

Hilaria’s biography on her agency’s speakers site states that she was born on the island of Majorca and raised in Boston, without specifying a timeline for her upbringing.    

In interviews over the years Hilaria has indicated that she moved from Spain to the US when she was 19 to attend New York University.  

But seeking to quell the social media firestorm in her video on Sunday, Hilaria changed her tune and said that she spent ‘some of’ her childhood in Spain and ‘some’ of it in Massachusetts, where she was born. She maintained that her entire family lives in Spain now.

‘There was a lot of back and forth my entire life,’ the Mom Brain podcaster explained.

‘And I’m really lucky that I grew up speaking two different languages and I’m trying to raise my kids, so they speak two languages too. And that’s something very important to me especially having my family abroad.’

Hilaria added: ‘Yeah I’m a different kind of Bostonian but that’s who I am, and you kind of can’t change your background – nor would I want to – I’m really, really proud of who I am.’

Hilaria noted that ’44 people from Spain’ attended her 2012 wedding to Oscar nominee Alec Baldwin, but she hasn’t seen her family since September 2019 because of ‘the pandemic’.

The NYU alum and her 62-year-old husband gave all five of their children Spanish names – daughter Carmen Gabriela, 7; son Rafael Thomas, 5; son Leonardo Ángel, 4; son Romeo Alejandro, 2; and son Eduardo ‘Edu’ Pao Lucas, 3 months.

As for her name, Hilaria said she’d use Hillary in the States and Hilaria in Spain. 

‘My whole family call me Hilaria. It always kind of bothered me that neither name sounds good in the other language. So I would use one or the other one,’ she said. 

‘A handful of years before I met Alec, I decided to consolidate the two…It means happy in both languages. I think we can all be really like clear that it’s the same name just a few letters difference, so I don’t think we should be upset about it.’

The yogi indicated that in her youth she tried to be her ‘coolest self,’ but ‘as you get older you kind of just embrace who you are and you just kind of want to be open about it and that’s what I’m trying to do here. 

Hilaria – who boasts 852K Instagram followers – later Instastoried never-before-seen snaps of herself in Spain since she never posts about her being in the country or visiting family there.

She also shared a Spanish-language text from her brother and concluded: ‘I’ve said my piece.’

Hilaria’s husband Alec took to Instagram on Sunday – not to address the allegations, but rather to blast outlets like TMZ and the New York Post for printing claims he called ‘spectacularly false’.  

‘They’ve said it about people I love – false things. Untrue things,’ the actor said.

‘And as much as that hurts, the only thing I can do is talk to that half of the public or that portion of the public who understands what I mean when I say: “Consider the source.” It’s a sunny day here. We’re going to enjoy a sunny day – me and my little pack.’

He then whispered for emphasis: ‘When you love somebody you want to defend them.’

The online frenzy over Hilaria’s heritage was sparked on December 21 when a woman tweeted: ‘You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.’

In the next few days several videos of Hilaria’s past TV appearances resurfaced showing her commitment to a Spanish accent, including one where she seemingly forgot the English word for ‘cucumber’. 

Yet Hilaria appeared to slip out of the accent last week when she took to Instagram Live to react to a prank post from comedian Amy Schumer. 

Schumer had shared a photo of Hilaria posing in lingerie with her newborn son Eduardo Pau Lucas along with a caption that painted Schumer as the person in the snap.   

Several former classmates of Hilaria’s entered the fray on Twitter to confirm that she was in fact raised in Massachusetts. 

‘I went to high school with her. Genuinely lovely person, I recall, but fully a white girl from Cambridge,’ one wrote.

Another added: ‘I went to high school with her. She was perfectly nice and serious about ballroom dancing. Her name was indeed Hillary Hayward-Thomas and she did not have her current accent.’ 

Internet sleuths were quick to uncover details about Hilaria’s parents, Dr Kathryn Hayword and David Thomas, who worked as professors in the US for years before retiring to Majorca in 2011, according to Page Six. 

While Hilaria has long described her mother as Spanish, records revealed that Dr Hayword is in fact a fourth-generation Massachusetts resident. 

Hilaria’s father’s family has even deeper ties to the US, having lived here since before the American Revolution. 

Hilaria is listed as an alum of the Cambridge School of Weston School in Weston, Massachusetts, despite claiming in April of this year that she moved to New York from Spain in 2003 to attend NYU. 

‘I came for school and I never, ever left,’ she said in an interview entitled Motherhood, Marriage & Miscarriages.