For years, people have accused Hilaria Baldwin of faking a Spanish accent and pretending to be a Spaniard. Hilaria, who is married to Alec Baldwin, was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas, but at some point, started going by Hilaria. Previously, she explained that her family visited Spain frequently when she was growing up. When she was in Spain, she went by Hilaria, she claimed.
Alec and Hilaria have both made comments suggesting that Hilaria was Spanish. But in 2020, a post about Hilaria’s Spanish accent went viral. “You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person,” a social media user who goes by @lenibriscoe wrote at the time. Per Vox, the Twitter (now X) user shared a clip of Hilaria on the Today show. In the clip, Hilaria said, “How do you say it in English?” when pointing to cucumbers.
In response to the backlash, Hilaria admitted that she was born in Boston. Now that Hilaria is starring in a reality TV show, the fake accent accusations have come to light again. When Hilaria and Alec started promoting The Baldwins, some fans noticed that Hilaria’s accent sounded different.
“Where did her Spanish accent go?!” one person commented on a promotional video, per Today.
On the March 16, 2025, episode of The Baldwins, Hilaria addressed the Spanish accent controversy once again, and continued to defend it. Hilaria now has another explanation for her suspicious accent changes: “code-switching.”
“They say that it’s like communication, if you ever talk to a really old person who cannot hear, and I’m gonna emphasize, I’m gonna speak slower,” Hilaria explained on the show, via People. “And you’re not even really thinking about it. You just start to do it. You know what it’s called? Code-switching.”
Hilaria went on to say that she “had to learn about” code-switching because “the whole world was mean to me.”
“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 on the show. She explained further: “You can chameleon. You know, people who code-switch we’re very good at chameleoning … and you don’t even think you’re not even thinking about it. It’s just normal. It’s just natural.”
However, many people on social media argued that Hilaria was not code-switching; she was simply “faking” an accent.
“It’s not code switching when you NEVER HAD AND ACCENT!!” one person wrote on Reddit. “You are just FAKING AN ACCENT.”
Others called Hilaria out for doubling down instead of taking responsibility. “The lengths she will go to, and the lows she will sink to, in order to justify the unjustifiable … it’s staggering,” another person wrote.
Hilaria also addressed the controversy during a confessional interview in the season premiere of The Baldwins. “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, per The Independent. “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.”
