It’s safe to say that 2020 has come with its fair share of weird and wonderful news stories, with a particular emphasis on the weird. From mysterious monoliths to murder hornets, you could be forgiven for thinking that the seemingly neverending cycle of bizarre news was finally winding down for the holidays. Yet a last-minute contender for the strangest story of the year has decided to make a late entry, involving, of all people, Hilaria Baldwin.
For those unfamiliar with Baldwin, a quick primer: as the founder of yoga studio Yoga Vida, which now counts four branches across New York, Baldwin first came to wider public attention as Alec Baldwin’s second wife. The couple met in 2011 and married the following year in New York City; in the time since, they have become parents to five children, Carmen, Rafael, Leonardo, Romeo, and Eduardo. And it was the youngest of these children—her three-month-old son, Eduardo—who inadvertently sparked an online investigation into Baldwin’s now-scrutinized claims to Spanish heritage.
On December 20th, Baldwin took to her Instagram to share a photo of herself holding Eduardo while wearing lingerie, a post that was shared (and then deleted) by Amy Schumer to her Instagram stories, with a tongue-in-cheek caption reading, “Gene [Schumer’s son] and I wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday season. Enjoy it with whatever family members are talking to you this year.” It seems that Baldwin failed to see the funny side in Schumer’s ribbing, offering a response on her Instagram that claimed being mocked for the post was an affront to her message of “body positivity.”
The real reason why the video set social media aflame, however, was Baldwin’s American accent. While you might initially struggle to see what the issue with that could possibly be, Twitter user Leni Briscoe was on hand to provide the answer. “You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade-long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person,” she wrote, before launching into a now-viral thread outlining some of Baldwin’s tenuous claims to a Spanish cultural identity.
It all began with a series of clips from the beginning of Baldwin’s marriage when she first began making the press rounds, appearing on Good Morning America in 2012 with an overt Spanish accent, and on The Today Show in 2015 apparently forgetting the English word for cucumber and asking the presenter for a reminder. Twitter quickly began spotting inconsistencies and poking holes in Baldwin’s backstory, with the biography on her agency’s website citing her as being born in Mallorca, Spain, a now-contested fact that Baldwin has done little to dispel, noting in the past that she moved to the U.S. at the age of 19 to attend New York University.
In fact, as various Twitter users began pointing out, while Baldwin’s parents do live in Mallorca today, she was brought up in Massachusetts, with evidence that she attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston quickly surfacing and various former classmates going on the record to Page Six describing her as “fully a white girl from Cambridge”—known at the time simply as Hillary—who had no trace of the Spanish accent that she seems to have acquired at points over the past decade.
“Yes, I am a white girl,” Baldwin said in the first of the Instagram face-to-camera videos she has posted to address the controversy. “Europe has a lot of white people in there. My family is white. Ethnically I am a mix of many, many, many things. Culturally, I grew up with the two cultures. So it’s really as simple as that.” In a second video, she added: “I spent a lot of my childhood in Spain. My nuclear family lives in Spain and has lived there for a long time. And I came here—I was moving around a lot—but I came here when I was 19 years old to go to college.”
The claims have also warranted a response from Alec Baldwin himself, who, in a surreal eight-minute video posted to his Instagram that somehow touches on everything from Jeffrey Epstein to TMZ, implores anyone questioning his wife’s background to “consider the source,” said in a whisper that some Twitter users described as “sinister.” It seems that Internet sleuths won’t be concluding their investigations any time soon—or at least until the end of 2020.
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December 29, 2020 at 06:21AM
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The Curious Case of Hilaria Baldwin’s Accent, Explained - Vogue
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