Hilaria Baldwin addresses claims she fabricated Spanish accent, admits name is ‘Hillary’

The mother of five left fans confused when she broke out an American accent on Instagram last week to bemoan body-shaming after stand-up comedian Amy Schumer re-posted a photograph of Baldwin in lingerie taken three months after giving birth.

The controversy escalated when Twitter user Leni Briscoe alleged that Baldwin cultivated a false persona while in the public light. "You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person," the accuser wrote, mapping out how Baldwin has faked her Spanish heritage.

The post was accompanied by several videos that sought to expose Baldwin. One clip in particular that garnered the most attention showed Baldwin forgetting the English word for "cucumber" during an appearance on the Today show.

Other posts revealed that Baldwin grew up in Massachusetts, which clashes with Baldwin’s previous claim on the #MOMTRUTHS podcast in an April episode of "Motherhood, Marriage & Miscarriages" when she explained that she didn't move to the United States until she was 19-year-old to study at New York University. Baldwin's parents, Dr. Kathryn Hayward and David Thomas, do live on the island of Mallorca after leaving America in 2011, PageSix reported.

The discovery also contradicts what her official agency biography reads on the speakers site: "Baldwin was born in Mallorca, Spain and raised in Boston, Massachusetts."

Other accounts on Twitter came forward to state that they attended high school with Baldwin in Beantown when "she had no accent" as an "archetypal northeastern prep schooler [sic]."

"[W]e all mythologize ourselves, but her pretending to be ESL [English as a second or foreign language] is a level of exaggeration that seems problematic," the former schoolmate fired.

The Daily Beast found her senior yearbook, demonstrating that Baldwin went by the name "Hillary Hayward-Thomas" at the time while enrolled at the private Cambridge School of Weston. Her old MySpace page corroborated this finding and a Nexis search disclosed that her New York voter registration is under both the monikers "Hilaria L. Baldwin" and "Hillary Hayward-Thomas."

On Sunday morning, Baldwin took to Instagram after the social media backlash to explain her side of the story. "First thing I told my husband is that I was born in Boston," she stated to the camera. "I spent a lot of my childhood in Spain. My nuclear family lives in Spain and has lived there for a long time. And I came here—I was moving around a lot—but I came here when I was 19-years-old to go to college."

Baldwin also maintained that she never said that her mother was Spanish, adding that her ethnicity stems from several countries.

"I don’t really understand why this is turning into such a big thing. I want to take it seriously, but I also don’t want it to be all of a sudden I’m apologizing for who I am," she volleyed. "Because at this point, I’m starting to feel that I’m being attacked for who I am, and that no answer is the right answer."

Her caption noted that she takes her identity and culture "very seriously" after witnessing chatter online that questions her origins, moving on to reiterate her case as she's "done many times before."

"I was born in Boston and grew up spending time with my family between Massachusetts and Spain. My parents and sibling live in Spain and I chose to live here, in the USA," she contended.

Baldwin stated that she and her husband "celebrate both cultures in our home" by their raising children bilingual just as she was. "This is very important to me. I understand that my story is a little different, but it is mine, and I’m very proud of it," she concluded.

Responding to inquiries about her fluctuating accent, Baldwin replied: "I am that person. If I've been speaking a lot of Spanish, I tend to mix them or if I'm speaking a lot of English, I mix that. It's one of those things I've always been a bit insecure about."

Baldwin tries to "enunciate" for work, she justified, but if she becomes "nervous or upset," she blends the two languages. "It’s not something I’m playing at…I want that to be very, very clear," she indicated.

Discussing the Anglicization of her name, she moved on: "When I was growing up, in this country I would use the name Hillary, and in Spain I would use Hilaria and my family, my parents, call me Hilaria."

Then a few years prior to meeting her famous husband, she said she "consolidated" to lessen the confusion but still uses the name "Hilaria," because that’s what her family calls her.

"We can all be really clear that it's the same name. It's just a few letters different. We shouldn’t be so upset about it," she snapped back. "Whatever you guys want to call me, I will respond to both."

She suggested: "Ultimately, this boils down to this idea where this is a country of a lot of different cultures and I think that we can be different parts of ourselves with different people."

"I am somebody who I feel really lucky that I grew up with two cultures, I grew up speaking two languages," she conceded to the "white girl" identity, acknowledging that Europe has a lot of white citizens. "Ethnically I am a mix of many, many things."

Her husband rallied behind her to trash the Twitter user on Sunday, comparing the accuser to "used coasters with the rings on them and the stains on them."

Urging others to "publicly dump Twitter tomorrow," the 62-year-old "30 Rock" star also took aim at the platform itself: "You have to kind of hack your way through the debris of Twitter. Twitter is just a vast orchard of crap."

"We live in a world now where we’re hidden behind the anonymity of social media. People can say anything. There have been things said about people I love, that I care about deeply, that are ridiculous," he quipped.

Stirring the pot once more, Schumer jabbed again after the two women traded barbs. "I get it. I went to Spain a couple times and loved it too," she wrote Sunday in a of herself in sunglasses and an oversized beach hat. She signed off with the cucumber emoji, a thinly-veiled reference. For now, the back-and-forth exchanges have settled.