The New York Times about the recent claims that she has been staging, in the words of Twitter’s @lenibriscoe, “a decade long grift” of pretending to be Spanish ever since first wooing Alec Baldwin. Prior to that, she was known to friends and family as Hillary Hayward-Thomas, a dancer from Boston who graduated from the Cambridge School of Weston at age 18 — despite Hilaria’s prior claims that she moved from Spain to New York City at age 19 to attend NYU. Beyond a fondness for Latin dancing, former classmates have been hard-pressed to recall any hint of Spanish heritage, and quick checks into both of Hilaria’s parents showed they (and their parents before them) had been born and raised in America. Among many reasons why these questions about Hilaria’s heritage (and Spanish accent) did not come up sooner is the conspicuous absence of those parents on her Instagram, a social media feed largely dedicated to documenting her family life. And given the intimacy with which Hilaria’s invited us into her family life, her explanation for why she’s kept photos of her parents hidden from her page made no sense.