In an excerpt from her book, “Manual Not Included,” Hilaria Baldwin wrote that she is neurodivergent and said that’s why she sometimes speaks Spanish and sometimes English.
“The more I got treatment for the ADHD that I was trying to ignore, the better I got at separating the two languages and not getting as distracted,” Baldwin wrote in her book, according to People. “I tried to improve myself in all the ways the internet trolls had told me I was broken. And then I got to the point where I realized: This is not helping me. I am mixed-up but I am not bad or broken. And then Hilaria returned.”
Baldwin, who went by Hillary until 2009, was accused of appropriating Spanish culture when it was revealed in 2020 that she was not born and raised in Spain, as some articles about her had reported, and grew up primarily in Boston. She has said that she grew up speaking both Spanish and English.
During the first episode of her TLC reality show with her husband, Baldwin said speaking both English and Spanish doesn’t make her “inauthentic”; it makes her “normal.”
Baldwin also defends herself in her book, according to People, writing that it’s “ridiculous” anyone would be “outraged or amused” because she forgot a word, seemingly referencing a clip of herself on “The Today Show” in 2015 in which she forgot the word “cucumber.”
“Can you be honest right now, reading this: Have you ever forgotten a word,” Baldwin writes in her book, People said.
She reportedly added that the backlash caused her to feel “confused” and “lost,” and said that when she woke up, she “wanted to be dead.”
“I’d sit on my bathroom floor, nursing my baby Edu at 3 a.m., and speak to my brother in Spain, and I’d cry to him, nauseous about it all,” Baldwin writes. “He’d try to lighten things up by saying, ‘Can we just stop for a second and talk about how nonsensical this is? You’re speaking to me in Spain, where I’ve lived for most of my life, in Spanish, about the validity of our connection to Spain. No one is really offended —it’s COVID, and they are home alone and bored, and there is so much misinformation.’”
People shares that in her book, Baldwin references a New York Times article about male soccer players’ accents switching up when they change teams in different countries or how sometimes they take on their teammates’ different accents. Baldwin reportedly suggests that she’s received backlash because she’s a woman.
“I am not a male soccer player, though, and, looking back, I have learned that it isn’t just malice and ignorance that led to the insanity I experienced; it really was about a woman and her voice,” she writes, according to People. “Taking her voice.”
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