Hilaria Baldwin has addressed the backlash she received amid her accent and identity scandal.
In 2020, the Boston-born yoga instructor – who has been married to Alec Baldwin since 2012 – was accused of cultural appropriation for speaking with a Spanish accent.
It was also revealed that her birth name was Hillary Hayward-Thomas, going by the name until around 2009 when she began referring to herself as Hilaria.
Later, the author and podcaster, 41, claimed her changing voice was a result of her spending time in both Spain and the US when she was growing up.
During the latest episode of reality TV show The Baldwins that aired yesterday, the mother-of-seven described how she learned to ‘code-switch’ long before the controversy.
‘Growing up in a way where you have multiple cultural influences on you means that you’re never going to be able to fit in. You can try,’ she said.
‘You can chameleon. You know, people who code-switch we’re very good at chameleon-ing and you don’t even think you’re not even thinking about it. It’s just normal. It’s just natural.’
While speaking to the older sister of one of her daughter Carmen’s friends who had lived in both the UK and America, Hilaria compared her experience of ‘code-switching’ – the practice of shifting from one linguistic code to another due to the context or setting – to that of speaking to an elderly person.
‘They say that it’s like… if you ever talk to a really old person who cannot hear… I’m gonna emphasise, I’m gonna speak slower,’ she continued.
‘And you’re not even really thinking about it. You just start to do it. You know what it’s called? Code-switching.’
She added: ‘I had to learn about it because the whole world was mean to me, and so I had to learn it. It’s code-switching.’
In a confessional, Hilaria also insisted she tries not to take the criticism personally.
‘Being in, the spotlight, as people like to call it. People say, “Oh, don’t you get used to it?” No, you don’t get used to it,’ Hilaria noted.
‘You never get used to people being mean. But you take a deep breath, and I think you learn to distance yourself from it, and so, you know, you just try turning down the volume in my head a bit… and I’m not gonna take it personally.’
In an earlier interview for The Baldwins, Hilaria admitted the scandal put her in a ‘dark place’ for a while, but she had since decided that a changing accent ‘makes me normal.’
Hilaria previously claimed she deliberately decided not to share details of her upbringing in order to protect her not-famous parents, who moved to Spain in 2011.
‘The things I have shared about myself are very clear. I was born in Boston. I spent time in Boston and in Spain. My family now lives in Spain,’ she told the New York Times in 2020.
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.’
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