Hilaria Baldwin is setting the record straight on the rumors that her Spanish accent is fake.
The Boston-born yoga instructor—who shares children Carmen, 11, Rafael, 9, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 6, Eduardo and Marilu, both 4, and Ilaria, 2, with husband Alec Baldwin—addresses the speculation around her heritage and speaking voice in the premiere episode of her family’s upcoming TLC reality show The Baldwins.
“I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn’t make me inauthentic, and when I mix the two, that makes me normal,” Hilaria says during the Feb. 23 episode, per People. “I’d be lying if I said [the controversy] didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places.”
She continued, “But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms.”
