Chynna Phillips defends sister-in-law Hilaria Baldwin over fake Spanish roots controversey

Hilaria Baldwin’s sister-in-law singer Chynna Phillips is defending her after she was exposed for faking her Spanish identity for years even though she was born in Boston saying, ‘She’s a good woman and none of us are perfect.’

Phillips, who wrote the hit ‘Hold On’ with her girl group Wilson Phillips in 1990, spoke out on Tuesday on her Christian-themed YouTube series California Preaching.

‘I feel terrible. Who’s going to throw the first stone at my sweet sister-in-law? She’s a good woman and you know, none of us are perfect. We all have issues and we all have our thing,’ she said.

‘This is probably an awkward and embarrassing time for Alec and Hilaria. I’ve been texting Alec the whole time to make sure he’s okay and if he needs anything,’ she said to Page Six Tuesday.

Phillips is married to William ‘Billy’ Baldwin, the actor brother of Hilaria’s husband Alec Baldwin. 

In the controversy Hilaria, 36, who she shares five kids with Alec, has come under fire for acting like she was Spanish, faking a Spanish accent when speaking English and in one live televised interview pretended she didn’t know know the English word for ‘cucumber’. 

She has admitted that she was born in Boston to American parents, not in Majorca, Spain, as previously claimed. She later blamed the confusion on misinformed media reports.

A resurfaced blog post written by her father in 2015 reveals that she got her love for Spain from her dad, who wrote: ‘My path in life has been heavily influenced by Spanish language and culture, and not because I have one iota of latin blood in my veins.’

Her father, David L Thomas Jr, wrote about his fascination with Spain on International Integrator’s website, the company he founded with his wife Dr. Kathryn Hayward.

In the post he claims that he had a ‘life changing’ encounter with a Spanish priest while on a train bound for Madrid, and this man became a friend who helped him ‘become thoroughly immersed in Spanish life and culture.’

Then when he and Hayward retired in 2011 they moved to the Spanish island Majorca. Hilaria was 27 at the time. 

A newly resurfaced 2009 W-4 document reveals Hilaria took two attempts to get her own name right and scribbled out her first try to write her name, after adopting Hilaria, the Spanish version of ‘Hillary’, as her name for years.

The document shows she finally decided on Hillary L. Hayward-Thomas – the name she was born with – on her second attempt.

She was pictured for the first time since she was forced to confess she had been born in Boston as she stepped out for a stroll with her kids and husband in the Hamptons on Saturday. 

The online frenzy over Hilaria’s heritage was sparked on December 21 when a woman tweeted: ‘You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person.’ 

Hilaria seemed to lose any hint of an accent last week when she took to Instagram Live to clarify the issue. 

While Hilaria has long described her mother as Spanish, records revealed that Hayward is in fact a fourth-generation Massachusetts resident who spent most of her career practicing medicine in Longmeadow.

Kathryn went on to become an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She have birth to Hillary in January 1984 in Boston.

Dr Hayward’s father and Hilaria’s grandfather, Charles ‘Chuck’ Hayward, was born and raised in Massachusetts, as was his late wife Irene.

Hilaria’s father’s family has even deeper ties to the US, having lived here since before the American Revolution. He was an active volunteer for the Beacon Hill Civic Association during his ’37 years living in Boston,’ The New York Post reports.

Her parents also co-founded International Integrators in Boston.

Hilaria finally came clean about her upbringing on Sunday telling fans she spent ‘some of’ her childhood in Spain and ‘some’ of it in Massachusetts.

‘There was a lot of back and forth my entire life,’ the Mom Brain podcaster explained.

‘And I’m really lucky that I grew up speaking two different languages and I’m trying to raise my kids, so they speak two languages too. And that’s something very important to me especially having my family abroad.’

Hilaria added: ‘Yeah I’m a different kind of Bostonian but that’s who I am, and you kind of can’t change your background – nor would I want to – I’m really, really proud of who I am.’ 

She also noted that ’44 people from Spain’ attended her 2012 wedding to Oscar nominee Alec Baldwin, but she hasn’t seen her family since September 2019 because of ‘the pandemic’.

The NYU alum and her 62-year-old husband gave all five of their children Spanish names – daughter Carmen Gabriela, 7; son Rafael Thomas, 5; son Leonardo Ángel, 4; son Romeo Alejandro, 2; and son Eduardo ‘Edu’ Pao Lucas, 3 months.

As for her name, Hilaria said she’d use Hillary in the States and Hilaria in Spain.

‘My whole family call me Hilaria. It always kind of bothered me that neither name sounds good in the other language. So I would use one or the other one,’ she said.

Her video sparked a flurry of memes with some jokingly comparing her to Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug.

Krug, a professor of African American history at George Washington University, pretended to be black her entire career. Dolezal, a former NAACP leader, was unmasked as a white woman in 2015.

Despite claiming Majorca was her birthplace and that she only arrived into the US at the age of 19, DailyMail.com revealed that Hilaria grew up in a 100-year-old $4million house in the heart of the most desirable district in Boston.

Records show her parents 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.

DailyMail.com also discovered the only property her parents currently own on the island of Majorca in their names are two apartments dating from the 1960s in the center of Inca which they purchased last summer.

In an 80-minute cringe-worthy interview with the New York Times last week Hilaria denied she was guilty of cultural appropriation and that she ever tried to pretend she was Spanish at any time.

Alec has defended his wife over the scandal lashing out at a critic Monday night who called his wife Hilaria a ‘fraud’.

The SNL actor launched his latest attack on Monday night in the comments of an Instagram photo he posted in reference to the scandal, which featured the famous Mark Twain quote: ‘A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.’

A commenter quipped: ‘Like your wife being Spanish when she lived in Massachusetts her entire life. I take it her accent is fake as well? FRAUDS!’

Alec’s reply was scathingly succinct: ‘Go f**k yourself.’

He took a more subdued swipe at another critic via Twitter just before the Instagram spat, in response to a post about an opinion essay for People entitled: ‘Why the Hilaria Baldwin Scandal Is Painful for Immigrants — Including Me.’

The essay by Ale Russian slammed Hilaria for the ‘exaggerated’ accent she ‘appropriated as an adult’. 

Alec replied: ‘Fake? Exaggerated? Appropriated an accent as an adult? She lived in Spain for many years as a child. She lived both places.’   

This came after he first leaped to her defense in a social media video on Sunday. 

Without addressing the allegations directly, the SNL star said Twitter is ‘a lot of s**t’. 

‘You have to kind of hack your way through the debris of Twitter. Twitter is just a vast orchard of cr**,’ he continued. 

‘There’s things that have been said lately about people that I love, that I care about deeply, which are ridiculous. I mean, just ridiculous.

‘They’ve said it about people I love – false things. Untrue things. 

‘And as much as that hurts, the only thing I can do is talk to that half of the public or that portion of the public who understands what I mean when I say: “Consider the source. When you love somebody you want to defend them.”‘

On Monday he posted a quote seemingly about the incident to his Instagram page which read: ‘A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its shoes.’ 

A video of Alec on The Late Show in 2013 emerged Monday in which he impersonated his wife’s ‘Spanish’ accent, telling David Letterman: ‘My wife is from Spain.’