Hilaria Baldwin Says Her Spanglish Has a Medical Explanation. But Does That Change the Conversation?
By now, the internet knows exactly who Hilaria Baldwin is—or thinks it does. The former yoga instructor and reality TV star went viral in 2020. Back then, people discovered she had spent most of her life in Boston, despite frequently speaking in a Spanish accent and publicly identifying as someone who grew up in Spain.
Now, with the release of her memoir Manual Not Included, Hilaria Baldwin is back in the spotlight. This time with a new explanation: she says her Spanglish and fluctuating accents are tied to her neurodivergence.
Hilaria Baldwin says her ADHD and dyslexia affect her speech
According to multiple outlets, including Page Six and Jezebel, Baldwin reveals in her book that she has been diagnosed with both ADHD and dyslexia. “These [diagnoses] greatly impact my speech, my reading, my listening, my focus, my memory, and my self-confidence,” she writes. She goes on to explain that she has “a brain that is one part English, one part Spanish, seven dollops of mom brain, a heavy pour of distraction.”
The accent, she insists, is part of that cognitive swirl. In her words: “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.”
The backlash to Hilaria Baldwin’s accent hasn’t gone away
The backlash to Hilaria Baldwin’s shifting accent dates back to late 2020, when resurfaced clips showed her speaking in different accents across interviews. In one infamous segment on The Today Show, she appeared to forget the English word for “cucumber.” Critics accused her of faking a Spanish identity and capitalizing on ethnic ambiguity.
In Manual Not Included, Baldwin doesn’t deny the confusion but pushes back hard against the idea that she was ever trying to deceive. According to People, she writes, “I am mixed-up but I am not bad or broken.” And she now frames her experience as part of a broader misunderstanding of neurodivergent people.
Baldwin gets personal about the toll of public scrutiny
Hilaria Baldwin also opens up about how the controversy affected her mental health. According to Page Six, she writes: “I started to really unravel, was confused, and felt lost.” She added she missed her family, “couldn’t eat, and got very thin. I started to question my sanity. I started to question if I was a good person.”
She recounts a moment when she was “nursing my baby Edu at 3 a.m., and speak[ing] to my brother in Spain” while crying from the stress. “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.’”
Hilaria Baldwin thinks the reaction had a sexist connotation
In a pointed moment, Hilaria Baldwin references a New York Times article that talks about male soccer players who adopt new accents depending on the country they’re playing in. She suggests that her treatment was harsher because she is a woman. “It really was about a woman and her voice. Taking her voice,” she writes.
The comparison to male athletes who shift accents fluently, without facing similar accusations of inauthenticity, adds an additional layer to her argument. It’s not just about where she’s from—it’s about who gets to code-switch without consequence.
