Alec Baldwin’s wife Hilaria addresses controversy over her accent

Alec Baldwin’s wife was once famously embroiled in claims of a “decade-long grift” – but now she’s explained her side of it.

Hilaria Baldwin has opened up about the backlash to her “fake accent” on her reality series The Baldwins.

“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,” she said during the March 16 episode, reports the New York Post.

“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.”

The Baldwins follows Hilaria, 41, and her home life with husband Alec Baldwin, 66, and their seven children.

The famous family appears in a new reality show. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Hilaria and the 30 Rock star have been married since 2012. They’re parents of Carmen, 11, Rafael, 9, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 6, Eduardo and Maria, 4, and Ilaria, 2. Alec and ex-wife Kim Basinger are also parents of daughter Ireland, 29.

Ever since Hilaria became famous for marrying Alec, her background and her Spanish accent has been a subject of public scrutiny.

In 2020, Post columnist Maureen Callahan wrote that Hilaria is a “scam artist” on par with Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who claimed to be black.

Hilaria claims to be Spanish, but in 2020, a tweet from Leni Brisco read: “You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade-long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.”

At the time, Hilaria took to Instagram to respond in a since-deleted video.

“There’s been some questions about where I’m born, I’m born in Boston … I spent some of my childhood in Boston, some of my childhood in Spain, my family, my brother, my parents, my nephew, everybody is over there in Spain now, I’m here,” she said.

Her former classmates also came forward, with one posting at the time in a since-deleted tweet: “I went to high school with her. Genuinely lovely person, I recall, but fully a white girl from Cambridge.”

She opened up about her accent controversy. Picture: TLC

During Sunday’s episode of The Baldwins, Hilaria explained: “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.”

The former yoga instructor added, “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.”

On-screen, she noted switching her accent sometimes is like “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 emphasise, I’m gonna speak slower,” Hilaria explained. “And you’re not even really thinking about it. You just start to do it.”

She continued: “You know what it’s called? Code-switching … 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 earlier episodes of the show, Hilaria said that she loves both English and Spanish.

“And when I mix the two, that doesn’t make me inauthentic, it makes me normal,” and said about the criticism. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad and hurt and put me in dark places.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission.

Originally published as Alec Baldwin’s wife Hilaria addresses controversy over her accent