Hilaria Baldwin hit back at critics over her “fake accent” controversy and insists that she is not “inauthentic” because she is bilingual.
“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,” she said in a confessional scene on her new TLC reality show, “The Baldwins.”
“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,” the mom of seven, 41, added.
“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 said being bilingual is “normal” and “called being human.”
The Yoga Vida co-founder — who shares kids Carmen, 11, Rafael, 9, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 6, Eduardo, 4, María, 3, and Ilaria, 2, with husband Alec Baldwin — said she is also raising her kids to be bilingual.
“My family — all my nuclear family — now lives over in Spain,” she explained.
“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.”
In December 2020, Hilaria — who claimed to be from Spain — was outed as a woman named Hillary who was actually born in Boston.
In a lengthy Instagram video, the podcaster hit back at the criticism, saying that although she was born in Boston, she also spent some of her childhood in Spain and grew up speaking both English and Spanish.
Page Six previously reported that Hilaria’s parents didn’t move to Mallorca, Spain, until 2011 when she was already 27 years old.
“The Baldwins” premieres on Feb. 23 at 10 p.m. ET on TLC.
