Hilaria Baldwin is having a PR crisis, so she sat down with the big guns—The New York Times—to try to set the record straight on where she’s from and why she may or may not have faked a Spanish accent.
Hilaria and her husband Alec have spent much of the Christmas holiday squashing claims that she systematically faked a Spanish pedigree, after a Twitter used @lenibriscoe dug into her past, claiming that she was actually named Hillary, and hailed from Boston, not Spain, as she previously claimed. Her Creative Artists Agency bio, for example, claimed she was born in Mallorca, a detail that has been deleted since the controversy erupted.
“The things I have shared about myself are very clear,” she told the publication. “I was born in Boston. 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 Times that she first visited Spain when she was a baby, and returned yearly. She explained of her dubbing Spain “her home,”: “If my parents move to China, I am going to go to China and say, ‘I’m going home.'”
Hilaria also defended posing for the cover of Hola!, which referred to her as a Spaniard, saying she never reads about herself, so wasn’t aware of the error. Addressing the much-mocked Today Show interview in which she spoke in a heavy Spanish accent and claimed to forget the English word for “cucumber,” she said it was merely a “brain fart.”
“This has been a part of my whole life,” she told the newspaper, “and I can't make it go away just because some people don't understand it.”
She said, “My intentions are I’m living my life and my life is created by my parents, my different experiences, my languages, my culture and, yeah, my kids do have very Spanish-influenced names.”