The Hilaria Baldwin expose (The Streisand Effect) is lots of fun, but it's worth mentioning the details have been out there for a long time. Her former classmates have been fact checking her actual background on different forums for years. She apparently competed around Boston in Latin Dance competitions on school breaks (not soaking up Spanish authenticity in upscale, expat-dense Mallorca, where her parents didn't relocate until 2011.). People who knew her pre-NYC knew her as Hillary Hayward Thomas and her parents as affluent Boston professionals. Never knew her to employ a wobbly Spanish accent that doesn't in the least sound Mallorqui or Catalan.
Alec Baldwin waxed creepily white-knighish in her defense on his own social media but himself has been hyping the "my wife is from Spain" meme for years in interviews. I don't think he was catfished - he knew. An adorable, "exotic" "European" (I threw out my TV! Who ees Alejandro Baldwin? Haf some vegan soup! I don't like drama!") younger wife whose NYU attendance thus makes her "internationally" educated is a more marketable credential than a basic trust fund baby from Boston.
She can rename herself what she wants. OTOH, gambits such as claiming she's mistaken for the nanny when she's out with her kids ("We need to do better") while her WASP ancestry pre-dates the Mayflower and she grew up on Boston's Beacon Hill*, or using MLK day as a social media teaching moment about color by holding her spray-tanned arm against her daughter's pale one makes the concepts of offensive, entitled and audacity feel inadequate.
Her facade got blown up via her response to an Amy Schumer tweet in which she neglected to use her accent, prompting another twitter account to comment on her "decades long grift" pretending to be Spanish. The floodgates opened and twitter came with receipts. I don't know why that was the tipping point.
Tessa Virtue connection - Nivea sponsored Hilaria Baldwin's most recent miscarriage post (the one prior to the birth of her fifth child). So there's the standards. I didn't know the sponsored post game had gone that low.
Naturally, Hilaria has been hyping projects based on the importance of one's individual authenticity and comfort in one's own skin. Like other influencers we know.
Right wing publications like The Federalist love to take the foibles of virtue signaling left wing celebrity progressives to undermine progressive values, but these observations about the corrupt entertainment media are not wrong:
Domenech and Jashinksy agree that the media’s role in attempting to defend the celebrity shows publications’ corruption and unwillingness to provide accurate coverage to their audiences.
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In the aughts, bloggers like Perez Hilton earned a lot of money and a lot of backlash for harsh coverage of celebrities. Some of that backlash was warranted. But now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Rather than treating celebrities neutrally, the entertainment media treats them reflexively as protagonists. (See: the early coverage of Jussie Smollett’s hoax.)No surprise Hilaria's "defense" has been gaslighty, but people aren't having it. That's because the media isn't helping her, absent the predictable NY Times. I didn't think the media would go in this hard on Baldwin, but she's been wading in cultural appropriation waters for one, and for two, I don't believe the media actively knew differently about her. For three, once on the scent, acquiring receipts takes no effort - poof, here's her yearbook, the home where she grew up, a few quotes from former neighbors. Baldwin was able to perpetuate her scam for over a decade because the media just took what she said about her background on face value.
That's not the case with Tessa and Scott and the Canadian entertainment media which has enthusiastically cooperated with Tessa and Scott's con for well over a decade. That's where the points made by (sadly) The Federalist hit their target. CTV, for example, captioned Jackie Mascarin as Scott Moir's "fiancee'" knowing he's married to Tessa. This decades long complicity will complicate any coverage of their actual status. But we can be sure of a tidal wave of straw men and gaslighting.
Think about a guy on stage with his wife at a hometown Hall of Fame ceremony announcing his engagement to another woman while his own mom stood by lending her "authenticity" and the majority of those present knew this for the scam it was but kept their mouths shut or were denied an outlet to report what they knew. This is the sort of thing the Canadian entertainment complex has promoted and enabled. Where does that fall on the spectrum of audacity?
*Not to mention her boob implants, obvious 00 clothing size, strategically sculpted face, microbladed eyebrows, excruciatingly toned, flexible physique and blinding white, even dentistry (all $$$$ indicators) would guarantee fellow upscale mommies understood she was no nanny no matter what accent she deployed makes her claim even more comical.
