After Alec Baldwin popped onto Twitter Friday to once again complain about “cancel culture,” people replied by saying that his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, is simply facing the “consequences” of being caught trying to falsely pass herself off as a Spanish immigrant over the past 10 years.
Actually, Baldwin’s tweet made no mention of his wife or anyone else who he thought was being unfairly “canceled” in the court of public opinion, but some of Baldwin’s respondents assumed he was referring to his Boston-born influencer wife, who became embroiled in an “identity hoaxer” scandal at the end of December.
The mother of six and TV personality faced questions about her heritage after she was credibly accused of using a fluctuating Spanish accent and of falsely presenting herself as being “born” in Spain, being “from Spain,” or being “half-Spanish” in numerous interviews, on her parenting podcast or even while giving a presentation at the United Nations.
There also have been instances over the years when Alec Baldwin referred to his wife as being “from Spain” or imitated her supposed Spanish accent in interviews, leading people to wonder if he had been taken in by his wife’s alleged “grift” or if he was in on it.
On Friday, the famously testy 63-year-old actor wrote, “Cancel culture is like a forest fire in constant need of fuel.”
https://twitter.com/AlecBaldwln____/status/1393221991126036488
One person replied to Baldwin’s “cancel culture” tweet by writing: “Please don’t tell me you are still defending your wife’s inexcusable actions. Get over yourself people and admit that there are something called a consequences for bad behavior. You were caught and you don’t like the repercussions ay yi yi.”
Someone else reminded Baldwin and others of the time when his Boston-reared wife, 37, publicized her role as “contributing writer” for Glam Belleza Latina Magazine, Glamour magazine’s “beauty destination for Latina women.”
https://twitter.com/laMultimediana/status/1393295004433633286
When Hilaria Baldwin’s heritage scandal broke, the self-styled wellness expert and yoga teacher stayed off Instagram for about a month. She returned to Instagram with a statement that critics called a “non-apology apology.” She said nothing about her documented efforts to mislead people about her cultural background. She just said she was “sorry” for not being “more clear” about her heritage.
Hilaria Baldwin has since stopped taping episodes of her parenting podcast, “Mom Brain.” She also barely shares links to brands she’s endorsing in her Instagram posts, indicating she may have lost brand sponsorship deals after she was accused of cultural appropriation.
But does that mean Alec Baldwin’s wife has been “canceled?”
Hilaria Baldwin has kept herself in the entertainment/gossip headlines by flooding her Instagram with regular updates and photos of her family, including the surprising news in early March that she and Alec brought home a new baby daughter under mysterious circumstances. Hilaria had given birth to a baby son five months earlier.
Hilaria also continues to share photos of a part-wild Bengal kitten she said she and Alec adopted for their 7-year-old daughter, even after the People for the Ethnical Treatment for Animals (PETA) expressed disappointment that self-avowed animal welfare advocates would buy a designer cat from a breeder, not adopt from a shelter.
Hilaria has more than 900,000 followers on Instagram, and she can get thousands of “likes” for each post. She has turned off her comments so she won’t have to deal with any criticism, but her critics on Reddit and social media have suggested she engages in a common PR practice of paying to have fake accounts follow her and like her posts.
Meanwhile, people laughed at the “irony” of Alec Baldwin’s “cancel culture” tweet. Someone tweeted that Alec Baldwin is probably against cancel culture because his wife’s “on the other end of it.” Yet another person wrote: “Really ? Do you need violins with that tweet?”
And still another person referred to the infamous “cucumber clip” in a tweet.
“It’s called accountability,” the person tweeted. “If you predicate your whole career on a lie then people might be annoyed. Cucumber.”
The tweet refers to Hilaria Baldwin’s 2015 appearance on the “Today” show to demonstrate cooking gazpacho. Using a slight Spanish accent, she indicated she briefly forgot the English word for — “how you say in English?” — cucumber.
A few people agreed with Baldwin’s call out against “cancel culture,” with one person agreeing “100 percent” and others blaming “crazy liberals” and the “out-of-control left.”
Ultimately, it’s hard to know exactly what event prompted Baldwin to dash off his tweet Friday morning. In recent months, Baldwin has spoken out against cancel culture while defending his friend and colleague, Woody Allen, who Baldwin argues has never been found guilty in a criminal court of molesting his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, in 1992.
Baldwin faced massive backlash for his defense of Allen in early March when the molestation allegations were revisited in detail in an explosive four-part HBO documentary.
“Cancel culture is out of control,” Baldwin said in a video he posted to Instagram.
“There are people who deserved to be punished for what they’ve done,” Baldwin said. “But I think the cancel culture is creating more problems than it solves. It’s like trawling, like a giant mile-long net where you’re catching a lot of people, a lot, many who deserve it but a few — more than a few — who don’t, where they don’t deserve to have their careers and their lives destroyed.”
Allen’s name hasn’t been in the news much since the fury over the HBO docu-series died down, and could be why people assume Baldwin was talking about Hillaria Baldwin in his new cancel culture tweet.
Alec Baldwin angrily announced he was leaving Twitter in early March when a failed joke he made about actor Gillian Anderson’s fluctuating British and American accents also reminded people of his wife’s scandal. The actor, of course, has since returned to Twitter, but he fumed in a March 7 Instagram video that Twitter is where “all the a–holes in the United States and beyond go to get their advanced degrees in a–holines.”
Baldwin added: “You can’t do any irony in the United States anymore because the United States is such an uptight, stressed out place.”
