Hilaria Baldwin was always a Spanish wannabe – but she really put her foot in her mouth when she changed her name from Hillary, her longtime dance partner says.
“The whole ‘Hilaria’ thing is hilarious to me,” Alexander Rechits, who danced competitively with the now-controversial yoga-bending celeb from 2006 to 2009, told the New York Times.
Rechits, who knew the 36-year-old American wife of actor Alec Baldwin by her first name, Hillary Hayward-Thomas, said it was clear back then that she wanted to portray herself as something she wasn’t.
“I understand why she did it,” Rechits said in an interview published Wednesday, adding that he found Hilaria sweet and talented.
“It has always been her wish to be considered Spanish,” he said.
“She had roots in Spain, her brother lived there, she visited a lot,” he said, referring to the fact that Hilaria’s parents now live in Mallorca and her family would travel to Spain as a child.
“But Hillary is a very good, strong name, so why change that when you were born here and not born in Spain?” said the resident of Belarus.
“I have a lot of nicknames in Russian. But I am still Alexander everywhere I go. “
Hilaria, who has no Spanish ancestry, has come under fire for allegedly misrepresenting herself as Spanish – repeatedly referring publicly to Spain as her ‘home’, sometimes adopting a badly thick Spanish accent and failing to produce numerous publications and even one of her official webbios who falsely said she was born in Mallorca.
For her wedding to Alec in 2012, she wore a traditional white Spanish mantilla veil and waved a flamenco fan at her groom at an altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, while the couple acted in rings in Spanish and danced to the Puerto Rican. crooner Luis Miguel.
The lifestyle influencer was forced to take to social media this weekend to acknowledge that she is “a white girl”, born in Boston, originally named Hillary, and attending high school in Massachusetts.