Inside Hilaria and Alec Baldwin’s Spanish-inspired wedding

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Hillary Thomas-Hayward officially became Hilaria Baldwin when she wed husband Alec in a star-studded wedding, complete 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.

It would be another eight years until it was alleged Hilaria was misrepresenting her background, when a woman tweeted last week: ‘You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person’.

The 36-year-old has given countless interviews where she boasts of her childhood and family in Mallorca, claiming she moved to the US when she was 19 to attend New York University. 

The mother-of-five sometimes speaks with a Spanish lilt and once forgot the English word for ‘cucumber’ while cooking on the Today show. 

Hilaria admitted in a rambling video over the weekend that her real name is Hillary, she was born in Boston, she only spent ‘some of’ her childhood in Spain and clarified she is ‘a white girl.’

But in 2012, Hilaria incorporated several Spanish elements in her 175-guest wedding on June 30, 2012, claiming to People at the time: ‘I liked that I brought in a bit of my culture.’  

The couple married at Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan, with the nuptials including readings in both English and Spanish.

Hilaria donned a long white veil with lace embroidering the crown of her head, reminiscent of a mantilla, a traditional Spanish lace worn over the head and shoulders.

She later told People: ‘I liked that I brought in a bit of my culture.’ 

During their vows, Hilaria is also seen fanning herself with a flamenco hand fan. 

The couple exchanged wedding bands that have the inscription ‘somos un buen equipo’ – meaning ‘we are a good team’ in English.

The lovebirds had their first dance to Contigo by Luis Miguel and when celebrating their third anniversary, Hilaria posed a video montage of their wedding with the song Ave Maria playing over the clip. 

In a previous interview, she said she walked down the aisle to it, explaining it is one of her favorite Spanish-language songs, although the song is Latin.  

Even the couple’s proposal was an ode to Spain. 

When Alec proposed just three months earlier in the Hamptons, Hilaria told Extra TV that he chose Montauk because it was ‘as close as he could get to Spain, to my family’. 

Later that year, Hilaria spoke with Vanity Fair España, describing her marital bliss and dropped an anecdote about how her family couldn’t understand how to pronounce her new last name – Baldwin.

The translated article reads: ‘For now, she confesses, she has enough with learning to spell her new last name. 

”I had to repeat it to my family three times: Baldddwinnn. And the third time they said Oh, we already know who it is! Why didn’t you pronounce it right the first time?” 

Hilaria’s parents, although they retired to Spain in 2011, spent a majority of their lives in the US.

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

She is even seen in an unearthed video clip talking about growing up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, where she spent most of her career practicing medicine.

Dr Hayward’s father and Hilaria’s grandfather, Charles ‘Chuck’ Hayward, was born and raised in Massachusetts, as was his late wife Irene.

Dr Hayward went on to become an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She gave birth to Hillary in January 1984 in Boston – not Mallorca as previously claimed by the influencer.

Hilaria’s father’s family has even deeper ties to the US, having lived here since before the American Revolution. He was an active volunteer for the Beacon Hill Civic Association during his 37 years living in Boston, The New York Post reports. 

Hilaria was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas, attending exclusive $64,900-a-year The Cambridge School of Weston in Massachusetts, pictured in the yearbook and is listed as a 2002 alumni.

Hilaria claimed in April of this year that she moved to New York from Spain in 2003 to attend New York University.

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

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

‘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.’

Hilaria’s accent has also fluctuated as recently as 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.

Seeking to quell the social media firestorm in her video on Sunday, Hilaria said 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.

The influencer has graced the cover of Spanish magazine Hola! where she was identified as a Spanish person throughout the interview.

Her husband Alec has also called her Spanish.

He defended his wife on Instagram, saying: ‘The majority of what’s been said, and—again, I don’t want to enumerate what those things are—is false. And some of it’s so spectacularly false.’

‘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.’

‘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 said Sunday.

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 US 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.’ She 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 shared on her Instagram story never-before-seen snaps of herself in Spain.

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

Speaking about the ‘spectacularly false’ printing claims, Alec 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.’