Following the bizarre revelation that Alec Baldwin’s yogini-influencer wife, Hilaria, has been cosplaying as a Spanish person for years, the 30 Rock star has come to her defense in true pugilist fashion.
The opening salvo was a deeply odd eight-minute Instagram video posted after it emerged that “Hilaria” was born in Massachusetts, her parents are upper-class Americans with roots predating colonial times, she attended a tony private school in Weston that costs $63,000 a year (where she did not have an accent), and her birth name is Hillary.
In Baldwin’s video response—in between railing against Facebook, comparing the Twitter sleuth who unmasked Hilaria, @lenibriscoe, to a stained bar coaster, and explaining why his telephone number might have ended up in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book (?)—he pleaded again and again with his millions of followers to “consider the source,” while calling the allegations against his 36-year-old wife “venom” and “ridiculous.” Its meandering nature conjured comparisons to a certain 45th president.
Then, the 62-year-old Baldwin took it upon himself to signal-boost notorious anti-vaxxer/conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, just as the first batches of COVID-19 vaccine are being administered during a global pandemic.
He wasn’t through. Late last night, Baldwin posted a long comment under a Hilaria Instagram post stating, “I understood, from day one, that you were born here and raised, for many years, in both the US and Spain. You never claimed you were from Spain. You always maintained you were born here.” (In the video, Hilaria confessed that she was born in Boston, and maintained that she’d spent some of her childhood in Spain—although that claim is unsubstantiated.)
That, unfortunately, is not true. In a podcast earlier this year, Hilaria claimed that she moved to the U.S. at 19 to go to New York University (not true); has repeatedly referred to Spain as her “home”; and has graced the cover of the Spanish-language publication Hola! magazine three times. Each time she was identified as Spanish in the accompanying story. Additionally, her Wikipedia and CAA speakers’ pages listed her birthplace as Mallorca, Spain (they’ve since been scrubbed). It appears that her habit of darkening her skin, affecting an accent, and forgetting the English word for “cucumber” was nothing more than an act by an opportunistic culture vulture.
And it seems that Baldwin was either in on the ruse or duped himself. As the Daily Mail’s Cheyenne Roundtree reported, Hilaria’s wedding to Baldwin in June 2012 was a Spanish-themed affair, with the bride donning a mantilla veil and waving a flamenco hand fan. According to the Mail, “The couple exchanged wedding bands that have the inscription ‘somos un buen equipo’—meaning ‘we are a good team’ in English. The lovebirds had their first dance to ‘Contigo’ by Luis Miguel and when celebrating their third anniversary, Hilaria posed a video montage of their wedding with the song ‘Ave Maria’ playing over the clip... She later told People of the nuptials, ‘I liked that I brought in a bit of my culture.’” In an interview with Vanity Fair España, she claimed that her parents had difficulty pronouncing the name “Baldwin.”
“I had to repeat it to my family three times: Baldddwinnn. And the third time they said, Oh, we already know who it is! Why didn’t you pronounce it right the first time?” she told the publication.
Baldwin, meanwhile, has repeatedly claimed that his wife was Spanish on social media. In April 2013, he tweeted an image of her pregnant and their dogs that said, “I miss my three Spanish ladies…” and Hilaria enthusiastically replied, “4!” That same month, Baldwin went on The Late Show With David Letterman to discuss the New York Post’s recent allegation that he’d gone on a racist tirade against a reporter. Over the course of their chat, Baldwin again said that his wife was Spanish, imitating his wife speaking to her hairdresser on the phone in a Spanish accent and telling Letterman, “My wife is from Spain.”
Two years earlier, in 2011, Baldwin tweeted out a Gipsy Kings song and dedicated it to “all yoga teachers from Spain”; Hilaria replied, “This is everything a Spanish yoga teacher could ever want! Gracias corazon.”
In the wake of the uproar, Baldwin—who has a reputation for verbally abusive behavior and once pleaded guilty to punching a man over a parking spot—has continued to paint himself as the victim of an online smear campaign and even told one critical Instagram user to “go fuck yourself.”
For a guy who’s made hay out of a downright terrible Trump impression, he’s acting awfully Trumpian right about now.
And remember, folks: Consider the source.
