Twitter User Admits to Kicking Off Hilaria Baldwin Accent Scandal: ‘We’re All Bored’
Many assumed that Hilaria Baldwin, the wife of actor Alec Baldwin, was from Spain. Recently, it came out that wasn’t the case — though Baldwin, an author, podcaster, and yoga teacher, maintains she’s never claimed otherwise. How did this scandal begin blowing up on the internet?
Hilaria Baldwin and the accent scandal: is she Spanish-speaking, and where are her parents from?
Recently, Baldwin told The New York Times how she found out about the Spanish accent scandal.
“I started seeing comments on my Instagram,” she explained. If you haven’t kept up, this was the controversy, in a nutshell:
Over the last week or so, millions of people, cooped up and tired and probably too online at the end of the year, have been surprised to learn that Hilaria Baldwin, 36 and the mother of five children with her husband, the actor Alec Baldwin, is not a Spaniard but an American who was born and raised in Boston and who was known, at least until 2009, as Hillary.
“It’s very surreal,” Baldwin told the publication. “There is not something I’m doing wrong, and I think there is a difference between hiding and creating a boundary.”
How the accent controversy got started on Twitter
On Dec. 21, 2020, the rumors began to swirl on Twitter. A woman with the username @Lenibriscoe wrote, “You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.” The Twitter user posted videos about Baldwin’s parents — as well as a clip of the yoga instructor appearing to forget the word for cucumber.
“She said that Ms. Baldwin’s American upbringing was an open secret among many people in New York and she just decided to make it less secret,” The New York Times further reported.
Apparently, this tweeter “was granted anonymity by The New York Times” out of fear for her safety. The publication explained:
… she said she was scared that Mr. Baldwin, who agreed to take an anger management course in 2019 in order to dispose of charges after a fight with a man over a parking spot and has been arrested, escorted from a plane and suspended from a job as an MSNBC host, all in the last decade, would punch her.
However, this Manhattan whistle-blower’s reasoning behind her Twitter drop is a bit odd — while simultaneously relatable, amid pandemic times.
“We’re all bored,” she told the paper, “and it’s just seemed so strange to me that no one had ever come out and said it, especially for someone who gets so much media attention.”
How her husband Alec Baldwin responded on Instagram
After the tweets began to go viral, Baldwin responded on both Twitter and Instagram, claiming she’s always said she’s from Boston, and that her family speaks Spanish and traveled there a lot when she was growing up. Her children also speak Spanish at school and home.
Baldwin’s husband also stood up for her on Instagram, writing: “You never claimed you were from Spain. You always maintained you were born here.”
The 30 Rock actor chalked it up to the country’s ills.
“And, as is often the case in a society such as the US is right now, the ravenous appetite for scandal will consume someone else,” Alec Baldwin commented.
