Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek’s network of contributors
Hilaria Baldwin is still “hurt” after a 2020 controversy surrounding her accent.
“I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn’t make me inauthentic, and when I mix the two, that makes me normal. I’d be lying if I said [the controversy] didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places,” she said on the premiere of her family’s new reality show, The Baldwins, according to People magazine in an article published on Thursday, February 20.
“But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” Baldwin, 41, continued, adding, “that’s normal. That’s called being human.”
The internet debate about Baldwin’s accent began when a few social media users did some digging and uncovered that Baldwin was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Moreover, her birth name was actually Hillary Hayward-Thomas, which she later confirmed in an interview with the New York Times.
The discovery led some to believe that Baldwin, who married actor Alec Baldwin in 2012, was actually faking her accent. However, Hilaria maintained that she grew up spending time in Boston and in Spain and that her family had always called her “Hilaria.”
“I spent time in Boston and in Spain. My family now lives in Spain. I moved 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. And now it seems like it’s not enough,” she told the outlet in December 2020.
As for why Hilaria is resurfacing the controversy four years later, it has a lot to do with her seven children.
“I’m raising my kids to be bilingual, I was raised bilingual. “My family — all my nuclear family — now lives over in Spain. I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language. I think just growing up and speaking two languages is extremely special,” she said on The Baldwins.
The family’s new reality show premieres on Sunday, February 23, at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
The post Why Hilaria Baldwin Defended Herself Following Controversy appeared first on Newsweek.
