Hilaria Baldwin was always a Spanish-wannabe — but she really put her foot in her mouth when she changed her name from Hillary, her old dance partner says.
“The whole ‘Hilaria’ thing is hilarious to me,” Alexander Rechits, who competitively danced with the now-embattled yoga-bending celeb from 2006 to 2009, told the New York Times.
Rechits, who knew the 36-year-old American wife of actor Alec Baldwin by her given name, Hillary Hayward-Thomas, said it was clear even then that she wanted to portray herself as something she wasn’t.
“I understand why she did it,” Rechits said in an interview published Wednesday, adding that he considered Hilaria sweet and talented.
“It was always her desire to be considered Spanish,’’ he said.
“She had roots in Spain, her brother lived there, she visited there a lot,’’ he said, referring to the fact that Hilaria’s parents now live in Mallorca and her family would travel to Spain when she was a child.
“But Hillary is a very good strong name, so why would you change that when you were born here and you weren’t born in Spain?” said the Belarus native.
“I have a lot of nicknames in Russian. But I’m still Alexander everywhere I go.”
Hilaria, who has no Spanish ancestry, has been under fire for allegedly misrepresenting herself as Spanish — repeatedly publicly referring to Spain as her “home,” adopting a bad thick Spanish accent at times and failing to correct numerous publications and even one of her official web bios that falsely said she was born on Mallorca.
For her wedding to Alec in 2012, she wore a traditional white Spanish mantilla veil and waved a flamenco fan at her groom at an altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, while the pair traded rings inscribed in Spanish and danced to Puerto Rican crooner Luis Miguel.
The lifestyle influencer was forced to take to social media over the weekend to acknowledge she is “a white girl” who was born in Boston, originally named Hillary and went to high school in Massachusetts.