Critics lashed out against Hilaria Baldwin in 2020 about her seemingly fake Spanish accent, and five years later she’s still desperately trying to explain it all away.
Baldwin came under fire for the way her Spanish accent sounded when social media users noticed inconsistencies in her accent. They began questioning her Spanish heritage and accused Baldwin of cultural appropriation and fabricating her identity. Baldwin addressed the matter in her upcoming book “Manual Not Included,” set for release May 6, claiming the allegations caused mental health struggles and made her question her existence, according to People. Baldwin piled on the excuses and claimed to be neurodivergent in an attempt to seemingly deflect from the allegations.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – NOVEMBER 21: Hilaria Baldwin attends the American Museum Of Natural History 2019 Gala at the American Museum of Natural History on November 21, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
“Growing up being neurodivergent, I had to work harder in school than many of the people around me,” Baldwin wrote in her book, according to People.
“I’m now aware that my brain just works differently and I can really succeed in the right environments and tasks,” she said.
“When I get stuck or go off on tangents and forget what I am saying while I am saying it . . . If you only knew how loud it is in my brain at any given moment! At that point, I had not discussed any of this publicly. I just existed in a land where sometimes I spoke one language and sometimes I spoke another, sometimes I mixed them and got mixed up, and I never talked about my processing differences. I just tried to be ‘normal,’” she wrote.
She related being neurodivergent to the allegations that she faked her Spanish heritage.
Hilaria Baldwin announces social media break after receiving backlash and sparking memes for ‘faking’ her Spanish heritage and accent.
Hilaria Baldwin has now confessed that her real name is ‘Hillary’ and she was actually born in Boston not Majorca. pic.twitter.com/2s7aYahlrL
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) December 27, 2020
“Now I know that it’s ridiculous that anyone would feel outraged or amused because someone forgot a word. Can you be honest right now, reading this: Have you ever forgotten a word?”
Baldwin then unleashed on readers, claiming her critics triggered an apparent mental health breakdown.
“But back then, I started to really unravel. I was confused. I felt lost. I missed my family. I couldn’t eat. I got very thin. I started to question my sanity. I started to question if I was a good person,” she wrote in her book, according to People.
“I returned to what I used to do as a child, and started to call myself stupid. When I woke up, I wanted to be dead. And I got worse and worse and worse,” she said.
In an excerpt she wrote, “I’d sit on my bathroom floor, nursing my baby Edu at 3 a.m., and speak to my brother in Spain, and I’d cry to him.”
That was followed up by a whole lot of seemingly defensive statements about how her brother has spent many years in Spain and raised his son there and how she sprinkles elements of her Spanish heritage in her daily life. Baldwin recalled teaching her children Spanish and her family having “certain Spanish foods.”
She later credited Alec Baldwin for helping her through it.
Baldwin recalled reading an article from The New York Times that said professional soccer players sometimes switch teams and play for a different country, which led to changes in their accents and speech patterns, and tried to use that as a parallel to justify her broken Spanish and ever-changing accent. (RELATED: ‘Correctile Dysfunction’: Alec Baldwin’s Wife Doubles Down On Public Emasculation)
“The more I got treatment for the ADHD that I was trying to ignore, the better I got at separating the two languages and not getting as distracted. I tried to improve myself in all the ways the internet trolls had told me I was broken,” Baldwin wrote, adding that she eventually “returned” when she recognized that she was “not bad or broken.”
Baldwin was born in Boston, Massachusetts, as Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas on Jan. 6, 1984, People previously reported. Her father had resided in the city four almost 40 years while her mother was born and brought up in the state. Since 2011, the couple have resided in Mallorca, Spain. A biography of Baldwin reportedly posted on the Creative Artists Agency’s website claimed she was born in Mallorca, according to The New York Times.
Baldwin told the NYT she first visited the country when she was a baby and said she visited there on at least an annual basis for years.
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
