Alec Baldwin’s Wife Hilaria Baldwin Addresses Fake Accent Controversy

Hilaria Baldwin brought up her fake accent controversy after husband Alec Baldwin said he “can’t understand” some of what she says.

During the first episode of TLC’s The Baldwins, which premieres on Sunday, February 23, Alec, 66, and Hilaria, 41, have a conversation about prenups.

“After my first marriage I said, ‘Let’s have a prenup,’” Alec, who was married to Kim Basinger from 1993 to 2002, said. “It was an awkward thing.”

Hilaria admitted that she didn’t fully grasp “what a prenup is,” adding, “Because you are like, ‘After a certain number of kids it is this.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? I will just sign it.’ Which was probably very stupid of me back then. Now, I would read it again. I just said, ‘I won’t sign it. I don’t really want to think about the end by the beginning.’ And then you were like, ‘I don’t want to do it either.’”

Before Hilaria could continue speaking, Alec asked her to pause.

“Let’s talk slower. You are speaking English in a Spanish cadence which is always perilous for me,” he noted. “Just slow down a kiss, I can’t understand you.”

Hilaria used the opportunity to address past drama about her accent. “I’m raising my kids to be bilingual, I was raised bilingual,” she explained in a confessional. “My family — all my nuclear family — now lives over in Spain. I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language. I think just growing up and speaking two languages is extremely special.”

While discussing her decision to speak to her kids in Spanish, Hilaria clapped back at critics who made her feel bad for embracing her identity, saying, “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. I’d be lying if I said [the drama] didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places.”

Hilaria, who shares seven kids with Alec, made headlines for her accent in December 2020 when social media users accused her of fabricating her comments about her Spanish heritage since she was born as Hilary in Boston, Massachusetts.

“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 on the TLC series. “That’s normal. That’s called being human.”

At the time of the initial controversy, Hilaria released a video addressing her relationship with her Spanish roots.

“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,” she captioned an Instagram post alongside a since-deleted video. “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 U.S.A.”

Hilaria offered more details in a February 2021 statement, writing, “I’ve spent the last month listening, reflecting, and asking myself how I can learn and grow. My parents raised my brother and me with two cultures, American and Spanish, and I feel a true sense of belonging to both. The way I’ve spoken about myself and my deep connection to two cultures could have been better explained — I should have been more clear and I’m sorry.”

She continued: “I’m proud of the way I was raised, and we’re raising our children to share the same love and respect for both. Being vulnerable and pushing ourselves to learn and grow is what we’ve built our community on, and I hope to get back to the supportive and kind environment we’ve built together.”

The Baldwins airs on TLC Sundays at 10 p.m. ET.