Hilaria (Hillary) Baldwin is one piece of work. In a new interview with The New York Times, Baldwin is coming to her own defense over the confusion of her heritage, blaming the media for the backlash on social media over the conflicting narrative regarding her lineage and occasional accent.
Actor Alec Baldwin‘s wife told The New York Times that public interest over the past few days in whether she is or isn’t from Spain has been “very surreal.” She added that she has done nothing “wrong.”
“I think there is a difference between hiding and creating a boundary,” she said.
“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.”
As a result of the scandal, clips of her husband saying during late night TV show appearances that his wife was from Spain began making the rounds on Twitter.
Although the former dancer has clarified that she was born in Massachusetts, biographies throughout the years have stated that she hailed from the Spanish island of Mallorca. She says those were all unauthorized.
Her official agency biography on the Creative Artists Agency’s site has finally been updated to remove any mention of her long-purported ties to Spain. It used to include the line, “Baldwin was born in Mallorca, Spain and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.” She had to know the bios existed, especially that one. Yet, she did not attempt to correct the information, that she knew was incorrect. So she was in on the grift.
“Today we have an opportunity to clarify for people who have been confused — and have been confused in some ways by people misrepresenting me,” she said.
As for her forgetting the English word for cucumber during a Today show appearance, she said it was simply a case of stage fright.
She didn’t know that ¡Hola! magazine, for which she has twice posed for the cover and which has written some 20 items about her on its English-language website so far this year, repeatedly reported inaccurately that she was a Spaniard because she said she didn’t read articles about herself.
Baldwin first visited Spain with her parents when she was a baby, she said, and she went at least yearly thereafter. She declined to explain in detail how frequently they traveled there or how long they stayed. “I think it would be maddening to do such a tight time line of everything. You know, sometimes there was school involved. Sometimes it was vacation. It was such a mix, mishmash, is that the right word? Like a mix of different things.”
“Who is to say what you’re allowed to absorb and not absorb growing up? This has been a part of my whole life and I can’t make it go away just because some people don’t understand it,” she said.
