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Hilaria Baldwin says that her ADHD and dyslexia may have led to her biggest scandal.
Several years ago, Hilaria’s accent became a hot topic of discussion.
This was not a case of people bullying a foreign-born American. Because she is American, and was accused of altering her accent (and name) in order to pretend to be from another country.
Though this is not the most painful source of backlash for her family, it clearly stings. And she’s talking about it.
Hilaria Baldwin is not from Spain
In 2020, social media users called out Hilaria Baldwin, accusing her of faking an accent to impersonate someone born in Spain.
The reality is that Hilaria was born as Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas.
And she was born in the exotic land of Boston, Massachussets.
In addition to her dubious accent, some believe that she engaged in a deliberate effort to mislead people about her origins.
For example, there was a memorable moment when Hilaria seemed to struggle to remember the word for “cucumber” in English on the Today show.
She also spoke about spending some of her childhood and some of her childhood in Spain.
Since then, she has clarified that her family simply vacationed in Spain.
Hilaria’s parents did move to Spain … when she was 27 years old.
That’s a little late to absorb an accent from a country where you don’t live.
She has a book!
Now, Hilaria Baldwin has come out with a memoir, Manual Not Included.
“I have ADHD and dyslexia,” she writes in an excerpt that Page Six shared.
“And,” she explains, “these greatly impact my speech, my reading, my listening, my focus, my memory, and my self-confidence.”
“My brain just works differently,” Hilaria summarizes in an uncharacteristically relatable moment.
“I have a brain that is one part English, one part Spanish, seven dollops of mom brain,” she characterizes.
Hilaria continues:
“A heavy pour of distraction when I get stuck or go off on tangents and forget what I am saying while I am saying it.”
To be fair, mixing up words is very common for bilingual speakers
“I just existed in a land where sometimes I spoke one language and sometimes I spoke another, sometimes I mixed them and got mixed up,” Hilaria offered.
“And I never talked about my processing differences,” she then admitted, adding that she’s never delved into “any of this publicly.”
When the backlash and mockery hit, Hilaria continued:
“I started to really unravel. I was confused.”
“I felt lost. I missed my family,” Hilaria wrote. She continued: I couldn’t eat. I got very thin.”
In her book, she continued: “I started to question my sanity. I started to question if I was a good person.”
Hilaria shared the depths of her despair: “I returned to what I used to do as a child, and started to call myself stupid. When I woke up, I wanted to be dead. And I got worse and worse and worse.”
Giving yourself a hard time doesn’t fix anything!
But many in the neurodivergent community may struggle to understand how ADHD could lead someone to seemingly present themselves as something that they’re not.
Hilaria Baldwin Now Claims Her Accent Changes Because She Has ADHD was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.