Hilaria Baldwin Claims The ‘World Was Mean to Me’ Amid Accent Controversy

On Sunday’s episode of their TLC reality series “The Baldwins,” the former yoga instructor described how she tried to “distance” herself from the drama.

On the March 16 episode of “The Baldwins,” the 41-year-old mom of seven reflected on the controversy over her allegedly fake Spanish accent, which went viral in 2020.

“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 explained on the show. “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.”

Her accent was brought up during a conversation with the 15-year-old sister of her daughter Carmen’s friend. During their conversation, she compared “code-switching” to talking to an elderly person.

“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. “And you’re not even really thinking about it. You just start to do it.”

“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,” she continued. “It’s code-switching.”

In a confessional, she explained that she never quite got used to being in the spotlight. “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 explained. “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,” she added.

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Hilaria’s origins. She was born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas in Boston, Massachusetts, and is of English, French-Canadian, German, Irish, and Slovak descent.

Although she said she was raised in a Spanish-speaking household and traveled to Spain each year, her mother was an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and her father was an attorney with a law degree from Georgetown University.

Alongside the 2020 video, Hilaria wrote, “I’ve seen chatter online questioning my identity and culture. This is something I take very seriously, and for those who are asking — I’ll reiterate my story, as I’ve done many times before.”

“I was born in Boston and grew up spending time with my family between Massachusetts and Spain,” she continued. “My parents and sibling live in Spain and I chose to live here, in the U.S.A.” Hilaria has one brother named Jeremy Hayward-Thomas.

Despite taking place years ago, their reality series has devoted a significant amount of time to addressing the controversy surrounding her allegedly fake accent.

“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 in a confessional during the show’s premiere episode last month. “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.”

“But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms,” she continued, noting that it is “normal” and “called being human.”

“The Baldwins” airs Sundays at 10 PM ET on TLC.