Hilaria Baldwin addresses claims about her heritage

Hilaria Baldwin, wife of actor Alec Baldwin, has responded to a Twitter user who posted more than 50 tweets from Dec. 21 to Christmas Day accusing the "Mom Brain" podcaster and author of saying she grew up in Spain despite being born and raised in Boston.

"I've seen chatter online questioning my identity and culture," Baldwin, 36, wrote on Instagram Sunday. "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. My parents and sibling live in Spain and I chose to live here, in the USA. We celebrate both cultures in our home — Alec and I are raising our children bilingual, just as I was raised." The couple, who have been living in East Hampton during the coronavirus pandemic, have five children aged 3 months to 7 years old.

In an accompanying video, Hilaria Baldwin again says she was "born in Boston, and then 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. And so there was a lot of back and forth my entire life and I'm really lucky that I grew up speaking two languages and I'm trying to raise my kids so that they speak two languages, too."

Nowhere in the Twitter thread, which includes more than a dozen video clips, does Hilaria Baldwin state that she was born in Spain. Since about 2011, when the former Hilaria Thomas began dating "30 Rock" Emmy Award winner Alec Baldwin, media outlets have stated she was born in Mallorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean Sea, and raised in Boston. Her mother, physician Kathryn Hayward, told the website Woman with Power in an unrelated interview in June that the family moved to Mallorca in 2011.

In Sunday's video, as in her previous accounts, Hilaria Baldwin indicated her family spent considerable time in Mallorca before uprooting and moving there. "When I was growing up in this country," where she graduated in 2002 from the Boston-area Cambridge School of Weston, "I would use the name Hilary, and in Spain I would use the name Hilaria. And my family, my parents, they'd call me Hilaria."

As an adult, with documents including medical prescriptions variously saying either "Hilary" or "Hilaria," she found it less confusing to use just one name.

"I identified more with Hilaria because that's what my family calls me," she said. Her sometimes appearing to speak with a slight Spanish accent comes about, she explained, "if I've been speaking a lot of Spanish." For her work, including TV appearances, "I try to enunciate [in English] a little bit more. But if I get nervous or upset or something, then I start to mix the two."

In his own Instagram video Sunday, the Amityville-born and Massapequa-raised Alec Baldwin, 62, did not explicitly mention the criticism of his wife, but bemoaned "a world now where we're hidden behind the anonymity of social media. People feel that they can say anything," including "things that have been said lately about people that I love, that I care about deeply, which are ridiculous. I mean, just ridiculous. Consider the source."

Model Ireland Baldwin, Alec Baldwin's 25-year-old daughter with his actress ex-wife Kim Basinger, defended Hilaria Baldwin on Instagram Stories, where posts cycle out after 24 hours.

"It's so pathetic that anyone would want to play detective and dig that deep into someone's life that they don't know," she said, adding, "This person has dug up, like, old tweets from Hilaria's high school peers and whatever. And they all say one thing about her, and that's that … she was really kind when they reflect back on their experience with her." She called Hilaria "a wonderful mother who takes great care of her kids and she takes great care of my dad and that's all that really matters to me. …"