Hilaria Baldwin, the wife of late-night TV’s ‘Donald Trump’, actor Alec Baldwin, appears to have been impersonating a Spanish person for years, potentially making her the highest-profile ‘race faker’ exposed in 2020.
A series of now-deleted Twitter posts went viral on Sunday, after a user by the name ‘Lenibriscoe’ shed some light on Baldwin’s curious media appearances.
In one of the clips Baldwin seems to be having some trouble maintaining a Spanish accent while giving an interview on Good Morning America. Another video from the show Today has the 36-year-old Bay-Stater say she could not remember the English word for “cucumber.”
As Lenibriscoe’s tweets spread on social media, more evidence of Baldwin claiming Spanish heritage surfaced.
The influencer’s CAA speaker page says she was born on Mallorca, a Mediterranean island off the cast of Spain, despite her actually having been born in Boston. While on a podcast earlier this year, Baldwin herself reiterated this claim, saying that that she moved to America from Mallorca, even adding she “knew no pop culture” in the US.
In 2018 Hola! magazine identified Baldwin as Spanish in their story. Her celebrity husband also regularly refers to his wife as Spanish on social media.
Unfortunately for Baldwin, her claims seem to go completely against two presumably credible sources. The first one would be her mother, Kathryn Hayward, who says that they moved to Mallorca in 2011, when Baldwin was about 27 years old.
The second source would be none other than Señora Baldwin herself. The blogger responded on Instagram to the accusations of race fakery, saying that she was indeed born in Boston, yet claiming that sometimes she merely gets confused which language to use, due to being bilingual.
According to Baldwin’s old Myspace page her real name appears to be Hillary Hayward-Thomas. Online commenters who claim to have been her classmates at a private school in Massachusetts describe her as “archetypal northeastern prep schooled”.
I Deleted my previous tweet. I went to HS with Hillary Hayward Thomas in Boston and she had no accent, was archetypal northeastern prep schooler. we all mythologize ourselves, but her pretending to be ESL is a level of exaggeration that seems problematic.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Baldwin’s unusual take on her own racial identity and the contradictory explanation on Instagram provoked some visceral backlash, with commenters mocking her behavior and calling it ‘nonsense’. Quite a few commenters wondered if her husband was “in on the con”.
My only question for @hilariabaldwinpic.twitter.com/67S6iR06qI
Rachel Dolezal of 2020. Wow. Was Alec in on the con? #HilariaBaldwin#Hilariahttps://t.co/wUxdDBG9oP
@hilariabaldwin the great pretender. Stop pretending you’re from Spain and faking a Spanish accent.
Take your cucumbers @hilariabaldwin and go away with your nonsense
Alec Baldwin also responded to the story, saying that he didn’t believe the “ridiculous” allegations made against his wife.
The ‘Hilaria’ Baldwin reveal seems to be very appropriate for the end of 2020. Besides quite a few disasters, this year also has seen a strange trend of white women in the US being exposed as pretending to be someone else.
Arguably it was professor Jessica Krug of George Washington University who kickstarted it a few months ago. Unlike Baldwin, the African studies scholar admitted to having faked being black much of her adult life after.
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