Hilaria Baldwin finally sets the record straight over her Spanish accent after years of ridicule

Hilaria Baldwin has finally set the record straight on her ‘fake’ Spanish accent, insisting that her bilingual upbringing has impacted how she sounds.

The 41-year-old mom-of-seven, real name Hillary Hayward-Thomas, who was born in an upscale neighborhood of Boston, has raised eyebrows over the years with her questionable dialect.

While her parents live in Majorca, she grew up in the states and is American – but she often uses a Spanish accent in interviews.

Speaking in her new TLC reality TV series The Baldwins, Hilaria said she is ‘normal’ for mixing English and Spanish while also expressing upset over being criticized for her accent.

‘My nuclear family now lives over in Spain,’ she said. ‘I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language.

‘I think just growing up speaking two languages is extremely special. I love English and I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic.

‘When I mix the two, it makes me normal!’

Hilaria, who shares seven kids with her husband Alec Baldwin, hinted that although the controversy over her accent has made her feel low, she has been able to lean on her loved ones for support.

The mom-of-seven addressed the criticism in her new TLC reality TV series The Baldwins 

She continued: ‘I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places.

‘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 is going to have an impact on how we sound and how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms.

‘That normal. That’s what’s called being human.’

Back in 2015, the entrepreneur first went viral for seemingly forgetting a simple word in her native tongue while cooking.

At the time, Hilaria had appeared in a now infamous six-minute segment on the Today Show and made an ‘authentic’ gazpacho.

The Living Clearly Method author listed the ingredients, and at one point, seemed to forget the English word for ‘cucumber.’

‘We have tomatoes, we have, um, how do you say in English? Cucumber,’ Hilaria said at the time. 

Hilaria was exposed four years ago by DailyMail.com for listing her birthplace as Majorca, Spain, on her agency’s website. 

Hilaria revealed that she is raising her seven children to be bilingual in English and Spanish 

She said that mixing the two languages makes her ‘normal’ 

In an Instagram video in 2021, Hilaria defended her behavior, claiming that while she was born in Boston, she spent ‘some of’ her childhood in Spain and ‘some’ of it in Massachusetts.

‘There was a lot of back and forth my entire life,’ she said. ‘I’m really lucky that I grew up speaking two different languages and I’m trying to raise my kids, so they speak two languages too.

‘And that’s something very important to me especially having my family abroad.’

Records show that Hilaria’s parents, attorney David Thomas and Harvard Medical School professor Kathryn Hayward, bought a $4 million five-bedroom, five-bath house in Boston’s Beacon Hill area in June 1987 when Hilaria was just three and didn’t move out until she had turned 28.

Neighbors there remembered her as a ‘very entitled young lady.’ What they had no recollection of was any Spanish accent.

Hilaria and her 30 Rock star husband have also given Spanish names to all their seven children: Carmen Gabriela, 10, Rafael Thomas, eight, Leonardo Angel Charles, seven, Romeo Alejandro David, six, Eduardo Pao Lucas, three, Maria Lucia Victoria, three, and Ilaria Catalina Irena. 

The Baldwins premieres Sunday, February 23 at 10/9c on TLC, with new episodes airing weekly. Episodes are available to stream on Max.