Alec Baldwin’s pseudo Spaniard wife grew up in a 100-year-old $4million house in the heart of the most desirable district in Boston, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.
Yoga teacher Hillary Hayward-Thomas — who has long pretended she was born on the Mediterranean resort island of Majorca and only spoke English with a pronounced Spanish accent — instead spent almost her entire childhood in the Beacon Hill district of Beantown.
Records show her parents, attorney David Thomas and Harvard Medical School professor Kathryn Hayward bought the five-bed, five-bath house on Pinckney Street in June 1987 when their daughter was just three years old. They didn’t move out till she had turned 28.
‘I don’t know what she is talking about,’ said the family’s former neighbor. ‘She lived here since she was a child. She didn’t call herself Hilaria then – just Hillary. And she certainly didn’t speak with a Spanish accent.
‘Once I was really upset with her and asked her to shut the gate to stop the dog getting out and she just looked at me and said: ‘I’ve lived here for 19 years,’ and stormed away.
‘She was a very entitled young lady.’
Hilaria Baldwin, who was actually born Hillary Hayward-Thomas, has come under fire for previously claiming that she came to the US from Spain when she was just 19 years old
DailyMail.com can reveal that she grew up in this 100-year-old $4million house in the heart of the most desirable district in Boston called Beacon Hill
Her parents bought the five-bed, five-bath house in June 1987 when their daughter was just three years old and didn’t move out till she had turned 28
The neighbor said she knew that Hillary’s brother Jeremy had gone to Majorca on a school exchange trip and that is when the family started to fall in love with the island, which lies 130 miles from mainland Spain.
‘It is troubling to watch people lie about what you have said and not said. You are the most principled and decent woman I have ever known,’ Alec said on Instagram in support of his wife
‘I didn’t really know them that well, but I know Jeremy tried to live in Spain for a while, but he felt he didn’t fit in, so came back, but then their parents decided to move there after they retired.’
Beacon Hill is regularly praised as the best area to live in Boston with its quaint narrow cobblestone streets and gas lighting and its closeness to both the Charles River and Boston Common.
Former secretary of state John Kerry lives a quarter-mile from the house Hilaria grew up in, while Ghislaine Maxwell’s husband Scott Borgerson’s townhouse is even closer.
Unlike most houses in Beacon Hill, Hilaria’s childhood home is set back from the street behind its own brick-tiled courtyard.
Her parents sold it for $2 million in 2012 but it has almost doubled in value to an estimated $3.95 million today, according to the real estate website Redfin.
When they sold, Thomas, now 71, and Hayward, 64, listed the white-painted house, built in 1899, as a ‘rare opportunity to live in a magnificent, private, single-family 5+ bedroom residence on Beacon Hill.’
They described the 3,200 sq. ft. house as ‘efficiently laid-out,’ saying it boasted a renovated kitchen with cherry cabinetry and Caesarstone countertops, multiple skylights, a ‘sun-flooded’ third-floor master suite, and ‘your very own gated large parking space.’
And it even had a finished basement with separate kitchen, which they pointed out would be ideal for an au pair.
Internet sleuths were quick to uncover details about Hilaria’s parents, Dr Kathryn Hayward and David Thomas, left, who worked in the US for years before retiring to Majorca in 2011. Hilaria’s brother Jeremy (right) married a Spanish woman and they all live in Spain
Her parents sold the Boston home for $2 million in 2012 but it has almost doubled in value to an estimated $3.95 million today. Pictured is an interior bedroom shot
When they sold, Thomas, now 71, and Hayward, 64, listed the white-painted house, built in 1899, as a ‘rare opportunity to live in a magnificent, private, single-family 5+ bedroom residence on Beacon Hill’
Unlike most houses in Beacon Hill, Hilaria’s childhood home is set back from the street behind its own brick-tiled courtyard
When DailyMail.com reached Thomas at his home in Majorca he immediately hung up.
Hilaria’s Walter Mitty-style life was blown sky-high after she posted a picture of herself in black lingerie holding her youngest son Eduardo which comic Amy Schumer made fun of.
The mom-of-five posted a video of herself responding to Schumer — but apparently forgot that she was supposed to have a Spanish accent and spoke with a non-specific American accent.
That sent it all up.
Leni Briscoe, a former classmate from the elite Cambridge School of Weston — where annual tuition costs $52,400 for day students and $64,900 for boarders — tweeted: ‘You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade-long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.’
The Twitter thread included a cooking clip from the Today show where Hilaria, speaking with a Spanish accent, has difficulty recalling how to say cucumber in English.
Two other classmates soon chimed in. Jeff Brodsky tweeted: ‘I went to high school with her. Genuinely lovely person, I recall, but fully a white girl from Cambridge.’
Jenna Laib added: ‘Hillary was kind and hard working.’
She corrected Brodsky on his geography by adding: ‘And, yes, a white girl from Boston. (I think they lived on the other side of the river.)’
Hillary attended Cambridge School of Weston — where annual tuition costs $52,400 for day students and $64,900 for boarders
Hilaria, who was born Hillary Hayward-Thomas, is seen in a yearbook photo from the Cambridge School of Weston and is listed as a senior in 2002
Two classmates chimed in. Jeff Brodsky tweeted: ‘I went to high school with her. Genuinely lovely person, I recall, but fully a white girl from Cambridge.’ Pictured is the Cambridge School
Now Hilaria — who once told Vanity Fair España her Spanish parents had difficulty pronouncing her married surname — has admitted she was born in Boston in a rambling Instagram video, saying: ‘Yes, I am a white girl. I am a white girl.
‘Let’s be very clear that Europe has a lot of white people in there and my family is white. Ethnically, I am a mix of many, many, many things. Culturally, I grew up with two cultures so it’s really as simple as that.’
But even that claim has raised eyebrows.
Her father’s family arrived in the United States before the American Revolution while her mother was the fourth generation of her family to live in Massachusetts.
An online obituary for her paternal grandfather, also called David Thomas, who died in March, said he took the family to Argentina, ‘an experience which instilled in his children a curiosity about the wider world and inspired them to become proficient in the Spanish language.’
Adding to the confusion, Alec’s daughter Ireland Baldwin called critics of her stepmother ‘sad and pathetic’ adding that she is ‘fully supportive of any individual of the Latinx community’ even though that gender-neutral term only covers people from Latin America, not from Spain.
Hilaria’s life was blown sky-high after she posted a picture of herself in black lingerie holding her youngest son Eduardo which comic Amy Schumer made fun of
The tweet that started it all: ‘You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade-long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person’
According to the couple, Alec, now 62, met Hilaria on an unseasonably warm day in February 2011 at Pure Food and Wine on New York City’s Irving Place. He said on Instagram that he was sitting outside with friend Brendan O’Connell and ‘as I turned to my left, I saw a woman who would change my life.’
‘He walked up and took my hand and said, ”I must know you,”’ Hilaria told the New York Times in its report on their June 2012 wedding. ‘You must know me?’ she allegedly replied. ‘And then he gave me his card.’
But even that story has holes in it, as she told the Times that she had never owned a television and didn’t really know who he was and ‘she was initially more focused on their age difference than on Mr. Baldwin’s screen persona.’
The couple married at Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in New York, 16 months after they first met.
Just about the only part of Hilaria’s backstory that has proven true is that she went to New York University in 2003 and was a member of the school’s ballroom dancing team. But it wasn’t after coming to America as a 19-year-old as she claimed.
‘I came for school and I never, ever left,’ she said in an interview entitled Motherhood, Marriage & Miscarriages in April.
Alec Baldwin appeared exhausted as he ran errands in the Hamptons on Tuesday after defending his wife, Hilaria, over claims that she faked her Spanish heritage
As for husband Alec, he is publicly backing his wife’s strange claims. ‘You are my life. And hard as it is now, the dog barks, but the parade goes on. I love you,’ he posted in a message to Hilaria on Instagram.
‘You never claimed you were from Spain. You always maintained you were born here,’ he wrote.
‘It is troubling to watch people lie about what you have said and not said. You are the most principled and decent woman I have ever known.
‘You are a woman born in America, raised for many years in another land and proud of your dual upbringing. You haven’t faked anything. Ever,’ he added.
He’d earlier tweeted: ‘Fake? Exaggerated? Appropriated an accent as an adult? She lived in Spain for many years as a child. She lived both places.’
But that’s news to her neighbor in Boston. ‘She lived here full-time with her family until she went to university,’ she told DailyMail.com.