The Hilaria Baldwin conspiracy deep dive
Fake pregnancies, moonbumps, yoga cults, bad vegans, alleged stalkers and the shameless grifting of the erstwhile Hillary Hayward-Thomas
It was an open secret for years. Many forum posts and comments on YouTube videos made reference to the fact that Hilaria Baldwin was in fact just a regular rich white woman from Boston named Hillary Hayward-Thomas. The basic lay of the land is that Alec Baldwin’s wife, Hilaria, put on a fake Spanish accent, a shellacking of spray tan, and pretended to be from Spain for about a decade. The Baldwins used their PR machine and connections to suppress the truth for years.
The story became viral because it hit a sweet spot during the malaise of the pandemic. People were looking for diversions. They wanted to read about something that wasn’t life-threatening or incredibly depressing. This event would come to be known as “Griftsmas.” Griftsmas is a neologism mixing together “grift,” which refers to a scam or hustle typically run by a con man or woman, and Christmas. The reference to Christmas was added because Hilaria’s outing came in late December right around the holidays. It was Santa’s gift to all the stressed out and overworked millennial women in the wider English-speaking world.
The Hilaria Baldwin-trashing community is referred to as a “snark” community in the taxonomy of the terminally online set. To be snarky is to be critical in an indirect or ironic way. Snark groups are typically populated by women and focused on entertainment subjects. The topics that people snark on are things like reality shows that are hate watched or enjoyed at some ironic distance. Guilty pleasures. Bravo shows. Think Real Housewives or the Kardashians. There are snark communities that make fun of religious fundamentalists and celebrities and TV shows. Snark is the yin to the yang of fandom or superfans of celebrities like Taylor Swift or Beyonce. Relentless positivity and protectiveness characterize fandoms. And relentless negativity and poking fun at a subject characterize snark.
I’m not interested in doing the full recap of the Hilaria Baldwin saga. Not today, anyway. If you aren’t familiar with the gist of what happened, there is a great primer on reddit.com/r/hilariabaldwin. The subreddit is the mecca of Hilaria Baldwin snarkers. Together the aggrieved women and amused onlookers gather daily to process the endless villain’s journey of the quintessential social media oversharer of the first quarter of the 21st century.
To quickly summarize as a jumping off point, though, Hilaria’s big lie was outed as a result of a typically meaningless social media beef. It finally spilled into the mainstream press in December 2020 as all the PR flacks were on holiday when Hilaria made an especially egregious Instagram post. She posted a photo of herself in lacy lingerie with her three-month-old child. Hilaria looked toned and not especially like she’d just had her fifth child. The post was also promoting Waxelene skin care products. A big element of why people find Hilaria so obnoxious is the constant commercialization of every moment of her and her family’s lives.
Amy Schumer reposted Hilaria’s post on Instagram and made an innocuous joke before quickly deleting it. Hilaria, never one to let an opportunity to play the victim go to waste, then replied to Amy. Hilaria complained about being “body shamed” for being thin. This was the Icarus moment when Hilaria had officially flown too close to the sun. Amidst the social media sniping, a PR professional from Brooklyn going by Leni Briscoe on Twitter took the ball and ran with it and the rest is internet history. Leni exposed Hilaria, starting her tweet storm by calling out Hilaria’s fake Spanish background and accent:
You have to admire Hilaria Baldwin’s commitment to her decade long grift where she impersonates a Spanish person
Now that we’ve got the introduction out of the way, I would like to focus on one specific area of the Hilaria Baldwin phenomenon. The thing that has fascinated me the most as I have followed this saga for the last two and a half years: the pregnancy truthers. It seems to me that women feel both repulsed and captivated by the personage of Hilaria / Hillary. I always think of the Ed Wood movie Glen or Glenda when writing Hilaria / Hillary. It’s like she had a psychotic break and really is at least two different people. I think the reason that Hilaria is an object of intense interest is because of how audacious and shameless she is in exploiting the insecurities of women. Hilaria is a textbook example of a “pick me” woman who props up her own self-image by slagging off other women.
One of Hilaria’s signature grifts, beyond the whole fake Spanish accent and invented backstory deal, is the pregnancy bounce back grift. Hilaria and Alec have seven children together. So there is an endless catalog of social media posts where Hilaria has shown how quickly she has been able to “recover” from her pregnancies. It’s a tabloid staple. Along with plastic surgery secrets, “who wore it better?” comparisons, and “celebs, they’re just like us!” where we see mega stars schlepping to Starbucks or taking a dump in the middle of the street like us plebs.
When I encountered the Hilaria moonbump conspiracy, I started down the rabbit hole of reading about other famous women using surrogates and allegedly faking pregnancies. A “moonbump” is a fake baby bump that’s used in film and television to make women appear to be pregnant. It’s a costume prop that can appear to be remarkably lifelike and it’s worn like a shapewear top with a prosthetic belly attached.
Hilaria is just one of many celebs who has been dogged by fake pregnancy allegations. The other ones who always come up in rumors are Meghan Markle and Beyonce. I’ll just leave it there in case you want to do some googling because this piece would be 500,000 words pretty quickly if I took that left turn. Before we travel too far down into this bramble bush of moonbumps and surrogates and celebrity gossip, I have to explain to you why this matters. Why would someone want to fake being pregnant? What is there to gain beyond the ego boost from the public thinking that someone like Hilaria can rebound like a superhero from the rigors of pregnancy?
Why new parents are the holy grail to advertisers
In the dark recesses of my brain box, back there with the baseball stats and the memories of all the embarrassing things I have ever done, there was a vague recollection of an article I’d read in the New York Times many years ago about pregnancy and advertising. The article explained how there is one demographic above all others that is the most lucrative for advertisers.
After rummaging around online, I found it. It’s from 2012 and the piece details how the retailer Target could determine the perfect window for advertising to women as they were becoming pregnant. The data analysis of Target was so good, their algorithm could often predict when women were pregnant before the women were even aware of it themselves. Target had to dial back their advertising because the invasive use of their personal information was creeping women out. So Target just started putting coupons for pregnancy-related items in bundles of other coupons for unrelated items. Given that this New York Times article is over a decade old, it is terrifying to think of how much more sophisticated the advertising algorithm has become and what else the hive mind knows about us before we do.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=9&_r=1&hp
(…) new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. (…) once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them. There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around the birth of a child, when parents are exhausted and overwhelmed and their shopping patterns and brand loyalties are up for grabs. (…) Because birth records are usually public, the moment a couple have a new baby, they are almost instantaneously barraged with offers and incentives and advertisements from all sorts of companies. Which means that the key is to reach them earlier, before any other retailers know a baby is on the way. Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. “Can you give us a list?” the marketers asked.
“We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there’s a good chance we could capture them for years,” Pole told me. “As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they’re going to start buying everything else too. If you’re rushing through the store, looking for bottles, and you pass orange juice, you’ll grab a carton. Oh, and there’s that new DVD I want. Soon, you’ll be buying cereal and paper towels from us, and keep coming back.”
An entire economy of influencers has cropped up to take advantage of the type of micro targeted advertising that is now possible. Women also drive the great majority of consumer spending decisions. If you wanted to hatch the perfect grift to appeal to advertisers, ideally you’d want something related to pregnancy.
Hilaria Baldwin’s pregnancy bounce back shtick on social media was perfectly positioned to market to women. For a handful of years before the Baldwins became utterly toxic to brands in late 2020, Hilaria had secured a bundle of high-profile endorsement deals with family-focused brands. She was becoming one of the go-to mommy blogger influencers and she specialized in high end brands. Hilaria’s posts used a collage of the most effective advertising techniques.
It was a lifestyle brand play. Hilaria is married to a well-connected star with a large family of beautiful children, and everyone appeared to be happy and healthy.
It was a FOMO play in that women would fear that they were missing out on whatever secret that Hilaria was using to return quickly to her “normal” pre-pregnancy body.
It played on the shame angle that is so effective in advertising. Women could take advantage of Hilaria’s expertise and use the same regimen that Hilaria used to recover within hours after birth even if they weren’t as rich or thin or pretty. Then they might also recover their self-esteem.
Maybe Hilaria was a genetic freak and maybe it was just that she could afford help and talented doctors. But maybe there was something to all of her wacky yoga poses and the fancy products she endorsed. Hilaria is a sentient Multi-Level Marketing scheme, and she was perfect for trendy brands marketed to the Hamptons country club elite and to the temporarily embarrassed millionaires who aspired to join them. Her superpower was creating a price anchoring distortion field. Price anchoring is where you charge a fortune for your mediocre products so consumers will default to the assumption that it is worth the money. Companies paid Hilaria big dollars to promote their upscale, aspirational family-friendly wares. If you wanted to rebound immediately like Hilaria, you might be persuaded to consider the following Hilaria endorsed items:
Seventh Generation eco-friendly cleaning solution ($18 for a pack of 4)
aden + anais 100% Cotton Muslin Baby Blanket ($55 for the newborn size)
Health Warrior Chia Bars ($24 for the Acai Berry 15 count package)
Waxelene Soothing Botanical Jelly ($108 for a pack of 6 travel-sized tubes)
Tom’s of Maine toothpaste ($28 for a 2-pack of Cinnamon Clove)
CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser ($12.27 for a 16 fl. Oz bottle)
Hilaria and Alec had so much juice they were able to arrange for a New York Times profile to try and staunch the reputational damage in December 2020. It takes a special person with an unlimited capacity for shamelessness to double-down on a fake ethnicity. As the tagline for the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit says, Rachel Dolezal walked so Hilaria could run. The opening paragraphs of this spin job are masterful at framing Griftsmas, the outing of Hilaria as a fake Spaniard, as some sort of accident or unforeseeable perfect storm.
“There is not something I’m doing wrong, and I think there is a difference between hiding and creating a boundary.” The Times quoted Hilaria as saying. As if she didn’t actually construct a fake identity. I think she is so full of shit that she’s gone around the bend, and she really believes her own lie. She’s gone full Kool Aid. Like Jim Jones, the cult leader, Hilaria has constructed a fake reality for herself that’s so all-encompassing that she cannot admit who she really is. As another borderline personality once said:
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake \ And someday you will ache like I ache
(Courtney Love in the song Doll Parts. That one Hole album is still a banger.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/30/style/hilaria-baldwin-interview.html
The clip where Hilaria Baldwin “forgets” the English word for cucumber. Twice.
I am now required by law to show you a clip of Hilaria (badly) faking a Spanish accent on the Today show. This doomed Hilaria to be a living meme. In the clip, Hilaria “forgets” the English word for cucumber. The Spanish word for cucumber is pepino, and that is the name that the Hilaria Baldwin obsessives on Reddit have given themselves. Pepinos. The nickname they conferred on themselves is a perfect example of the wit and inside jokes that are typical of snark communities.
In the clip, Hilaria shows Telemundo’s Evi Siskos, a woman with real Hispanic roots, how to make a “very authentic gazpacho.” Hilaria shows the ingredients and describes how to make the cold soup classic, her accent fading in and out. What I have noticed from watching way too many videos of Hilaria from her Latina cosplay period is that she actually sucks at speaking Spanish. It’s wild that she passed herself off as a native speaker and had to gall to appear on the cover of Spanish language magazines and do interviews with Spanish outlets.
https://www.today.com/video/make-hilaria-baldwins-simple-gazpacho-547323459831
Within the first minute of the Today Show segment, we get the infamous “how do you say in English … cucumber” line. Hilaria’s accent drifts back to basic valley girl up-speak. At about 50 seconds into the clip, Hillary / Hilaria is explaining that you need to peel the tomato. “I’m sure there’s way fancier ways, but this is how I learned it in Spain,” she says. The whole segment is 6 minutes and 2 seconds and an odyssey of wavering accent, weird edits, and a fiesta of awkward yet absorbing television. I would love to see the unedited footage of this train wreck. Can you imagine watching this bleary-eyed at 6am without knowing who this Hilaria character is?
At around 1:55, Hilaria completely loses her accent and enthuses about the dish, “It’s the easiest thing. You can’t mess this up.” Evi, the host, comments on Hilaria adding olive oil. “I think that’s a Spanish thing.” Evi says. Hilaria, who has been to Spain about as many times as I have, replies that if you don’t like olive oil, you shouldn’t go to Spain. At around 3 minutes and 20 seconds, Hilaria comments, “In this country, I never order gazpacho from the menu” really putting on the accent for the word “gazpacho” pronouncing it in a faux Barcelona lisp. This is like a caricature of a Spanish person on Saturday Night Live in the 70s. “It’s not something that’s in the palette of Spain, we don’t use spicier sauces” says Hilaria of the Tabasco that Americans allegedly add to gazpacho. “One of the traditional things that we do, in Spain, is we’ll take the actual ingredients, and if you’re serving them, I’m just doing this for show, you take the actual ingredients and you put them in little bowls, so a little tomato, a little bit of pepper” she says, hesitating for a moment to remember the word pepper. It is so mind bending to watch someone so deep in self-delusion like this. “A little bit of… I always forget… cucumber…” Hilaria “forgets” the word again and mercifully the clip finally ends.
Yoga to the People: Hillary Hayward-Thomas joins a yoga cult
Hilaria’s old name reminds me of teenybopper heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas. There are so many bizarre associations I have with this woman. Oh, by the way, did you know Hilaria was in a yoga cult? This little writing project is rapidly spinning out of control. There are a billion tributaries into the massive, raging river that is the Baldwinito Industrial Complex.
https://www.yourtango.com/news/employees-told-they-wont-be-paid-if-they-show-up-minute-late-work
A long, fascinating post on the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit detailed a story of a user who was in Hillary Hayward-Thomas’ yoga class in 2008. Hillary was, of course, a yoga teacher and she was one of many people in the inner circle of the guru of Yoga to the People (YTTP) Greg Gumucio. In 2020, Gumucio was accused by multiple women of sexual abuse in the most predictable canceling of all time. Yoga enthusiasts seem to be especially susceptible to cults. Yoga was one of the main avenues of recruitment for NXIVM, the sex cult that imploded when founder Keith Raniere was sentenced to 120 years in prison in 2020. Sarah Edmondson was a yoga teacher in Vancouver who became one of the most successful recruiters for NXIVM before she turned against Raniere and helped to bring down the cult.
Users in the Reddit thread described how Hilaria / Hillary was “heavily involved” with the founder of YTTP Greg Gumucio. Gumucio was also involved with many other women at the same time. Hilaria, in a typically Machiavellian move, left YTTP to start her own studio called Yoga Vida in 2010. The Reddit user also recounted that Hilaria started developing her new Spanish persona around this time and came back from a vacation to Spain with an accent. If this is true, this would be the most stereotypical culture vulture move ever.
This also was right around when Hilaria started seeing Alec. The timeline of their relationship is an interesting subplot all on its own. Many users on the Hilaria subreddit and elsewhere on the internet have made a parlor game out of speculating about how much Alec knew and when he knew about Hilaria and her background. After all, Hilaria’s parents and family are all obviously not Spanish. Her family is from the Boston area. Her mother, Dr. Kathryn Hayward, was a professor of medicine at Harvard. Her father, David Thomas, is a lawyer who went to Georgetown. Hilaria’s background is typical East Coast old money and the farthest thing from exotic. Alec had to have known unless Hilaria really went all out and didn’t let Alec meet her family. There is certainly some evidence that Hilaria did her best to compartmentalize aspects of her life.
https://pagesix.com/2020/12/28/who-are-hilaria-baldwins-parents/
A woman named Jill Bayne came forward with more details of Hilaria’s pre-Alec background. I assume Jill was also chiming in on Reddit, but in a string of TikTok videos, Jill goes into further detail about the yoga years for Hilaria. Jill described how Hilaria’s class was a weird mash up of some yoga with ab exercises and weird woo stuff. Apparently, Hilaria taught something called the “Felt Sense Experience Model” of trauma treatment. It sounds excruciating and like something that Monty Python would’ve thought up, but then cut from the Flying Circus for being too ridiculous. The TikTok videos add some really interesting gloss on the story. Jill, for example, talks about Hilaria’s transition from Hillary to Hilaria and how Greg, the yoga guru, helped Hillary announce she was now Hilaria to the yoga classes. I cannot imagine this happening, but then again, I am not part of a yoga cult or the coastal elite. Jeepers creepers.
https://www.yourtango.com/entertainment/hilaria-baldwins-former-coworker-details-her-spanish-grift
In part two of Jill’s TikTok saga, she gets into more details about Hilaria’s relationship with Greg, the yoga guru. Jill talks about how she had a memorable experience in a class to become an instructor. She thought that Hilaria and Greg were in a relationship. Hilaria was “caressing” Greg’s young son like he was her child and Jill assumed that Hilaria and Greg were married, and Hilaria was the boy’s mom. Jill then talks about how, at the time that Hilaria left YTTP to start Yoga Vida, Hilaria had a boyfriend named Eduardo or Edu. When Hilaria was outed in December 2020 for faking her identity, Jill found out that she had named her most recent child Eduardo or Edu as well. Jill says this is a detail that you could not make up and I agree it is typical of the bottomless capacity for flagrant messiness that Hilaria possesses.
On the topic of shameless and gross things that Hilaria has done, Jill also references Hilaria’s infamous MLK day post where Hilaria used her oldest child Carmen as a puppet to virtue signal about racism while also trying to reinforce that she had a darker skin tone than her daughter. It’s a wild post and I can’t do it justice in words, so here, watch it. It’s only 30 seconds, and it’s a direct portal into Hilaria’s rotten soul.
As if this tangent wasn’t messy enough, Jill talks about how Hilaria wouldn’t help hold Greg Gumucio accountable when he was accused of sexual abuse in 2020. People reached out to Hilaria, asking for her to back them up when they accused Gumucio of abuse, but Hilaria remained silent. Gumucio was himself a disciple of Bikram Choudhury, who founded Bikram yoga. Choudhury was also accused of sexual assault and of running a cult and fled the U.S. in 2016 to avoid facing his accusers. As I said earlier, the yoga world is riddled with cults. All of this is important to lay the groundwork, though, to show who we’re dealing with in the erstwhile Hillary Hayward-Thomas.
The moonbump truthers emerge
It’s hard to know how to introduce this topic because it is a wild conspiracy. Let’s just put this on front street. This would not be something that you could allege about just anyone. It takes a special person to carry off a lie like faking a series of pregnancies. And to secretly have a surrogate carry your child. And fake the “bounce back” when you never had to bounce back because you weren’t pregnant in the first place.
Let us also stipulate that if someone were to fake pregnancies to make an elaborate grift about being able to immediately return to a pre-pregnancy body, this would be incredibly damaging to women. It would make the hundreds of thousands of women following you on social media feel like lazy failures for not being able to shake off a postpartum recovery as if it were a hangover in your early 20s. It would be damaging to the millions of women who were exposed to your grift in newspapers and magazines that amplified your message onto their platforms. It would be damaging to men thinking that this was normal and to be expected. It is perhaps the ultimate expression of malignant narcissism.
At this juncture, you are probably wondering why there is an army of women (and a few men) on Reddit and elsewhere on the internet who think that Hilaria Baldwin has faked multiple pregnancies. Let us now, children of the online world, gather and examine the receipts. I shall lay them out on the carpet. Fan them out into piles like I used to organize my Magic: the Gathering cards. Into categories.
Here in one pile, we will keep the receipts about the relationship between Hilaria and Alec (or Aleek in Pepino-speak) and Alcea Surrogacy.
Here in another pile, we will organize our receipts about the timeline.
In yet another pile, we will parse the video and photographic evidence.
Over in the corner, we will have circumstantial pot-pourri about anecdotal evidence of other women’s pregnancy. These receipts are a little like tea leaves in that the message is hard to divine. But they are important to the overall texture of the mosaic in this case we will build together.
Finally, we will keep a separate pile that we will put in a far corner. This pile is full of some speculative, wild things and mostly it contains receipts about a woman named Genevieve Sabourin.
The timeline of the Baldwin children
As we can glean from the People article where the Baldwins made public all the intimate details of their reproductive lives, Alec and Hilaria have had seven children in just over nine years. According to the Baldwins, they had six the old-fashioned way and one via surrogate. The timing of the surrogacy is a very interesting wrinkle because it was baby number six according to the Baldwins, Maria, and this was around five months after Hilaria gave birth to Edu. So Hilaria would have been well into her first trimester when they decided to implant their fertilized egg into the surrogate. In the middle of the pandemic. There is much theorizing in the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit about this incongruous series of events.
So, let’s just do some napkin math because I love mapping out the dates for items on our conspiracy big board. According to a quick google search, the average pregnancy is 280 days. Hilaria and Alec’s first child was born on 8/23/2013. The Pepinos on the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit mostly seem to agree that Hilaria likely was actually pregnant for this first child and then faked the subsequent pregnancies, but we will return to this point later. This means that if we subtract 280 days from 8/23/2013, we arrive at 11/17/2012 for when Carmen was conceived.
A quick detour into how the Baldwins met and the Bad Vegan connection
I am well-versed in conspiracy lore and let me tell you that this case is giving me flashbacks to my days of reading up on the JFK assassination and other more spicy conspiracies that we won’t get into. Part of the problem in entering these rabbit warrens is that there’s a million different tangents I could go off on. To name just one juicy sidelight: Hilaria and Alec’s story of how they met is that they had a rendezvous at Pure Food and Wine in February 2011. In earlier versions of their retelling, they were set up by a woman named Sarma Melngailis who was the owner of Pure Food and Wine. This name may ring a faint bell for you if you watch a lot of garbage television. That’s because Sarma’s misadventures were chronicled in “Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives” which was a limited series on Netflix about how Sarma embezzled money and went on the lam with her weirdo husband Anthony Strangis who claimed he was involved in black ops for the U.S. government. It’s another giant mess that has a lot of similarities to the yoga cult that Hilaria was also involved in that degenerated into scandal and sordid tales of deep internet lore. Weird how the Baldwins keep ending up in the middle of these shady deals. Just you wait because we are only entering the shallow end of the Baldwin grift iceberg.
https://www.today.com/food/people/sarma-melngailis-netflix-bad-vegan-rcna19399
Back to the pregnancy timeline
So we will rely on People magazine as our bible as we continue to explore the relationship timeline of the Baldwins. We’ll fast forward past the courtship to April 2012 when Alec proposes. Never mind all the cringe-inducing details like Hilaria telling the media that her family couldn’t even pronounce the last name “Baldwin” because they didn’t watch TV in España. The details of the celebrity guests at their wedding are pretty weird, so let’s look at that excerpt real quick:
Alec and Hilaria tied the knot on June 30, 2012, at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in N.Y.C. Celebrity guests included Tina Fey, Woody Allen, Soon-Yi Previn, Mariska Hargitay, Robert Kennedy Jr. and Lorne Michaels, along with family and friends of the bride and groom.
I’m just going to let that list sit there uncommented on like a wet fart in church because we have bigger shrimp to skewer.
https://people.com/movies/alec-baldwin-hilaria-baldwin-relationship-timeline/
So, between approximately November 17, 2012, when their first child was conceived and September 22, 2022, when their latest child was born, there is a total of 3597 days. Just shy of ten years. 280 days per pregnancy times six claimed non-surrogate pregnancies equals 1680 days. Over those ten years, Hilaria was pregnant 47% of the time. Not including the two miscarriages she said happened in 2019. Another quick google search about the recommended time between pregnancies suggests that doctors advise women to wait 18 months before getting pregnant again. For ten years, Hilaria was pregnant for nine months, then had an interval of nine months, then was pregnant six times in a row. And it’s worth mentioning that she had her latest child at 38 going on 39 years old, so if these were all natural births, she is a remarkably fertile woman. And her hubby is 65 years old.
Angela Richardson-Mook and Alcea Surrogacy
Beyond the improbability of the timeline we have just gone over, one of the items of circumstantial evidence that got me interested enough to spend hours pouring over photographs and reading about the finer details of moonbump shapewear was Hilaria and Alec’s relationship with Angela Richardson-Mook the founder of Alcea Surrogacy. Keep in mind that according to the official Baldwin party line, the only child they had via surrogate was Maria, who was born 2/25/2021.
Angela Richardson-Mook was a guest on one of Hilaria’s awful podcasts called Mom Brain. Richardson-Mook appeared on the November 4, 2020 episode, which was all about surrogacy. The Instagram of Alcea Surrogacy also sent out a post congratulating “H and A on M” around the time that Maria was born in February 2021. Only the first initials are used in the post in some sort of misguided nod to HIPAA, but Redditors on the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit quickly connected the dots. This led to the predictable move of Alcea deleting their Instagram post that spilled the beans. Also, Hilaria followed Alcea on Instagram as well. So, through a couple of different avenues, the link between Alcea and Hilaria was established, and it appears to be very likely that the surrogacy of Maria was arranged through Alcea.
The even more damning layer to the Alcea connection, though, is the super sleuths on Reddit found a 10/3/19 Daily Mail article where Hilaria was paid to promote Nivea products and used the occasion of a miscarriage to do so. The selfie that Hilaria posted shows her in a doctor’s office in a gown and robe. The Reddit sleuths made a compelling case that this photo wasn’t from Hilaria’s claimed hospital visit for a miscarriage. Because of the distinctive hospital room and robe and gown that Hilaria was wearing in her selfie, Pepinos on Reddit found evidence to suggest that Hilaria was actually at an IVF egg retrieval unit at Cornell hospital in New York. The IVF unit had the same setup and robe and gown for patients to wear. A member of the Hilaria subreddit even went through the same procedure herself and had the same style of robe and gown during her IVF procedure.
The Daily Mail article about Hilaria’s Instagram ad for Nivea is a great example of how Hilaria operated on social media before December 2020 when the Baldwins became poison for companies looking for influencers to shill their products. After being outed for faking her Spanish heritage and the Rust shooting in October 2021, when Alec shot and killed Halyna Hutchins and injured Joel Souza in an incident on a movie set, the Baldwins could no longer capitalize on the booming family influencer market. One of the very clever nicknames that the subreddit has come up with for the Baldwins is dubbing them Brand-thrax for their ability to destroy the reputation of anything they associate with.
The photographic evidence
One of the threads I came across on Reddit that got me interested in delving deeper into this topic was titled, in part, “HOW I STOPPED ROLLING MY EYES *HARD* AND LEARNED TO LOVE THE FAKE BELLY THEORIES”. In the thread, the poster details why they changed their opinion on the moonbump truther perspective. Part of it was that one has to consider Hilaria’s character. Someone who will fake her ethnicity is much more likely than an average person to try to do something equally outrageous, like faking a pregnancy. The poster then details a laundry list of other things that Hilaria has been accused of lying about. From graduating from NYU, to being a professional dancer, to faking breastfeeding. These are rabbit holes that are too detailed for me to get into right now. But take a detour and read the Reddit post if you feel like burning a few more hours learning how shady one woman can be.
I agree with this poster’s take on Hilaria. The point about someone willing to lie about the Spanish heritage being more willing to lie about a pregnancy should be emphasized. It also jarred another memory of something I had read about the general disposition people have to believe others. Don’t judge me, but it was in a Malcolm Gladwell book. Gladwell called this the “default to truth.” People have evolved to default to believing other people because if we were skeptical all the time, the world would be even more of a hellscape than it already is. This tendency to believe other people is something that grifters take advantage of; we don’t want to think so badly of others to believe that they can do something so out-of-pocket like faking a pregnancy. Well-adjusted people from polite society don’t want to question someone about such a personal topic. Which again fits into the Machiavellian nature of Hilaria’s grifting. And why women despise her and let loose on Reddit in an anonymous forum. And it also explains why Hilaria could get away with her bullshit for so long.
This post also fills in a lot of the Alcea Surrogacy backstory and adds some additional details I haven’t mentioned yet. For example, founder Angela Richardson-Mook was discovered to be lurking in group calls with other people discussing Hilaria Baldwin on the Hilaria subreddit. There are many lines of evidence that Hilaria is connected to the Alcea Surrogacy people and that the surrogacy agency is monitoring the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit.
There appears to be a persistent attempt to astroturf the subreddit. Astroturfing is a manipulation of social media by PR agencies and reputational management companies. They create fake accounts, also called sockpuppet accounts, and then the PR companies will use these sockpuppets to try to influence discussions online. Repeatedly people on the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit will mention that discussion of surrogacy brings out the astroturfing efforts. Users notice an influx of new accounts with no other posting history coming into the subreddit to try to redirect any conversation about Hilaria having faked her pregnancy.
The thread also showed some examples of photos of Hilaria in her different pregnancies and this is where I thought this conspiracy theory became really interesting. In Hilaria’s first pregnancy with Carmen, Hilaria looks to me like a normal pregnant woman. You can see a systemic change to her body where every part of her, from her feet to her face, looks like it is glowing from pregnancy. You can simply tell visually that a woman’s body is compensating for the baby bump and especially at the end of the third trimester. Some of the photo comparisons of Hilaria’s different pregnancies were the first photos where I did a double take. The below Reddit thread that has photos from several of Hilaria’s pregnancies at about 8 months. In her first pregnancy, Hilaria appears to show the systemic effects of being pregnant. In the later photos, she looks like her normal ultra-skinny self, but with a ball-shaped growth strapped around her torso. Pepinos on Reddit also pointed out how there is a visible gap in the later photos between Hilaria’s chest and her baby bump. In the photos from 8 months into the first pregnancy, this gap is not present.
Then I found another post titled simply “Egg retrieval?” where we see Hilaria showing a slight baby bump where the background appears to be warped. The warping of the background is a well-known pitfall for people who are terrible at editing photos. Normally, it happens when someone wants to make themselves look skinny. They will pull in the curves of their waist, not thinking about how the background of the photo will also warp. It takes a skilled Photoshop user to edit a photo convincingly. In the below picture, we see warping around the bathroom tiles in the photos. But for Hilaria, it appears that she’s using some sort of editing to make her stomach look bigger rather than smaller.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HilariaBaldwin/comments/145882x/egg_retrieval/
One of the most popular posts in the 50,000 member Hilaria Baldwin subreddit shows a video of a very pregnant Hilaria doing yoga on all fours. A lock of hair falls across her pregnancy bump and appears to disappear into a blur. It viscerally reminded me of watching hours of videos of 9/11 including compilations of visual artifacts. Researching this article felt in part like I was making a documentary about a very silly false flag government conspiracy. That doesn’t mean I think the moonbump truthers are wrong. In fact, I think they’re probably on to something.
The process of watching the evidence slowly accrete was like observing the building of a miniature cathedral from piles of raw material. Eventually, there is a reality formation that emerges. As I sat in my blankets on a recliner documenting photos and videos in a spreadsheet, the conclusion became more and more concrete. It was a timewarp where a loose web of connections were woven into strands. In turn the warp and weft of each accumulated fact became a rich tapestry. Digital rivulets of data in a cave system formed stalactites and stalgmites.
The pregnant yoga clip also zooms in on the belly and is in slow motion, adding to the Zapruder film feel. All that’s missing from the vibe is the cigarette smoke curls and shafts of sunlight catching the particulate in the air. I used to smoke American Spirits thinking it was hip and writerly, but now I just chew gum and partake in Zone 2 cardio while watching videos of a rich celebrity-adjacent woman do fake pregnancy yoga.
Seeing the blurring and digital smudge marks in Hilaria’s social media posts becomes something akin to what I imagine a religious experience would be. It’s like seeing some glimpse of a deeper truth. It’s meditative and reminds me of learning about the fake Stemmons Freeway sign in the Zapruder film. I am witnessing objects in a video clip no longer obeying the laws of physics. Now we’re going in too deep. Also, there’s a partially exposed crotch shot which is typical of Hilaria’s disorienting combination of thirst traps and mommy blogging videos. Always the exhibitionist and seemingly oblivious to how she comes across to others and especially women. I think this might be because in Hilaria’s mind, her audience is primarily men. The comments of Pepinos are particularly withering on this point. It’s obnoxious and also troubling when Hilaria’s exhibitionism is combined with exposing her flock of children to anyone with a social media account.
Next, I came across a post titled “Never forget …. Square bump”. I’m looking at a very interesting photo of Hilaria sitting in a black dress at an event with a bizarre and square looking baby bump. The photo has the composition of a Renaissance fresco. There is a visual feast of facial expressions and body language. My eye is immediately down to the squished looking cube that’s sitting in Hilaria’s stomach area where normally a round baby bump would go. Then I see a woman photographer holding an SLR camera who appears to be looking towards Hilaria with a skeptical expression on her face. I then spot a man in the background looking at the ground with an expression that is partially annoyed, partially bored. It appears to be at some sort of charity event where people are clapping in an auditorium. Hilaria has her hands over her stomach as if attempting to obscure the awkward cube. The photo is from 2015, so Hilaria still has her “old face” pre fillers and plastic surgery.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HilariaBaldwin/comments/10p53ry/never_forget_square_bump/
After reading the thread, I am thinking to myself that it seems weird that Hilaria’s baby bump was a cube. Is this even possible? I don’t really know how these shapewear moonbumps work. It doesn’t seem plausible that they could take on this breadbox-looking form that I see in this photo. The Pepinos on the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit are sharp, though. Eventually, I stumble on the exact thing that answers this question. A woman from the subreddit purchased a cheaper moonbump-type product from Amazon to test out how they look. She is especially curious about how the moonbump moves when exercising so she posts a brief video clip of her doing some exercises while wearing it. As a happy accident, the moonbump deforms into a cube shape while she is moving around. This explains to me how it is possible for the fake baby bumps to bunch up into a cube and it makes sense when I see the movement of the Pepino wearing the fake baby bump. Here’s the clip:
A comment inside one of the megathreads has perhaps the best compilation of photos of the half dozen alleged pregnancies of Hilaria Baldwin. Included in this jamboree are photos like the one I have excerpted below where Hilaria does not appear to be pregnant at all despite being in her third trimester. There are numerous photos like this shown in timelines where within days of each other, the baby bump seems to come and go.
After spending some time sifting through photos of the mysterious, Schrödinger’s baby bump, I see a thread with photographs of Hilaria on the street taken by paparazzi. In these photos, the baby bump has disappeared. Hilaria, walking with her husband, the rageaholic Alec, is carrying a giant piece of poster board. Hilaria and Alec look almost sheepish in their expressions. This is nearly unprecedented for two of the most shameless people to have ever existed. Hilaria is also wearing a long housecoat, slippers and baggy clothes. It is as if she is wearing a giant flashing sign saying she is trying to distract attention anywhere but her torso.
I have also a renewed appreciation for the special insight that is unique to women from my time amongst the Pepinos. It’s not just about obvious things like how pregnancy works. For example, one commenter had an interesting observation about the difference between the type of clothing Hilaria wore in her first pregnancy versus all subsequent pregnancies. One of the things the commenter observed was that Hilaria started wearing a lot of ruched dresses and clothing that obscured the areas around the top and bottom of her torso.
I’m sure a lot of people, especially women, already know this, but I learned about what a ruched (pronounced “rooshed”) dress is after watching some YouTube videos. I started down that rabbit hole watching sewing videos. This is why it takes me forever to finish writing anything. And it’s why my notes for this piece clock in at about 60 pages in a Google doc. Anyway, ruched dresses have gathered or bunched up fabric that gives the garment a textured look. The theory is that Hilaria wore a lot of ruched dresses because it would hide the seam of the moonbump. The moonbump prosthesis goes over the torso like a fitted bodysuit and so it has seams under the chest and around the waistline.
https://www.reddit.com/r/HilariaBaldwin/comments/wssvro/i_still_get_a_good_laugh_of_these_paparazzi/
The photographic evidence is the most direct evidence that exists, but the circumstantial material piles up. The collective common sense, the wisdom of the crowd of Pepinos, at some point becomes overwhelming. It’s not just a few weird looking videos. There are some amazing stories and bizarre photos, yes. But it bears repeating. It is the entire mosaic of the case that matters. Maybe hearing one anecdote from someone who lives in the Hamptons and says she saw Hilaria drinking booze without a baby bump during one of her pregnancies has the ring of truth, but so what? So what if someone overheard gossip from Gwyneth Paltrow’s circle about the open secret of the surrogacies in the Hamptons? People say that the Baldwins are fake and gross, and Alec tried to pimp his wife to every mommy blogger and lifestyle brand in his orbit, but what does that really mean?
As I go over the connections in my mind, I hear Lester Freamon from The Wire.
“We’re building something here, detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.”
The deepest depths: Genevieve Sabourin the alleged stalker
You end up seeing a lot of things as you explore the depths of the Hilaria Baldwin subreddit. In the innocent, early days of exploring the half-baked world of Hilaria / Hillary, over and over again I would see references to a woman named Genevieve. At first, I put it together that she was someone who Alec and Hilaria said was a crazy stalker of theirs. Pepinos in the subreddit were divided about whether to even talk about Genevieve, so I got the sense that she was a taboo topic. The first thread I came across that addressed Genevieve directly summarized a video that Genevieve posted on YouTube. Genevieve claimed that before Alec married Hilaria, she had met up with Alec in February 2010 over Valentine’s weekend. Genevieve gave a detailed account of their relationship and how they first had met years earlier in 2000 on the ill-fated movie The Adventures of Pluto Nash where Genevieve was a producer and Alec had a cameo role. Genevieve claimed that Alec came on to her then, but she refused because he was married to Kim Basinger, his first wife. The gist of Genevieve’s story is that Alec propositioned her to be in a show business relationship for publicity purposes.
Before we get too much farther down into this specific briar patch of strangeness, I need to acknowledge that the Genevieve Sabourin story is wild. It comes off as improbable. It immediately reminded me of something the late, great comedian Patrice O’Neal said about the way people interpret conspiracy theories. Patrice was an iconoclast who had a unique perspective and a talent for storytelling and metaphor. On a radio show, Patrice was explaining how you have to use common sense and triangulate your information sources to make sense of what you’ve been told by the media. The big story at the time in 2011 was that Osama bin Laden’s body was dumped into the ocean after he was killed by Navy Seals in a compound in Pakistan.
You’re not allowed to say anything else until we cover this. Give me a straight answer, because flushing Bin Laden down the ocean like he’s cocaine. (…) Can we focus on one issue that bother us as a country? (…) Let’s concentrate on our own logic and our own scenario. And in anyone’s scenario, do you throw bin Laden into the ocean? (…) There’s a lot of things that’s going wrong with this bin Laden shit. (…) And this is where it starts to sound crazy. (…) Like if you tell me two plus two is four, and I know it is, but then you shove marbles in your ass, I’ll go, “Jesus, Anthony shoves marbles in his ass?” [but] that doesn’t discredit two plus two is four.
What is remarkable in retrospect about Patrice O’Neal’s intuition about the story of Bin Laden’s death is that the subject is still incredibly murky a dozen years later. Patrice died a few months after the Bin Laden death story and in 2015, Seymour Hersh wrote a long article that disputed many of the details of the killing of Bin Laden. There are many differing accounts that are chronicled online, some of which are collected in mainstream news sources like Wikipedia.
Just because someone is crazy doesn’t mean they cannot have a point. Just because someone is wrong about one thing doesn’t totally discredit them. But we must go into the Genevieve Sabourin story knowing that we need to look at other sources and use our own common sense to evaluate her claims.
Genevieve claimed that Alec Baldwin propositioned her in 2010 about entering into a relationship. She claims that part of Alec’s proposition included that they could arrange adoptions or use surrogates. She said that Alec told her they could put her into a pregnancy outfit, like a moonbump suit, and fake a pregnancy. Genevieve’s claim is that Alec wanted her to act the part of someone who was totally smitten with Alec to cultivate positive press coverage. In return, Alec would pay her expenses.
Her version of events is that they had a short physical relationship in 2010, and she at first refused the offer to be Alec’s showbiz wife. Genevieve’s recounting on this is a little all over the place, and hard to follow at times. It is also important to note that she is not a native English speaker. Genevieve is a French Canadian. She claims that she thought Alec might be testing her with the request to be his fake partner. She was confused by it and then Alec gave her a private, non-traceable email to contact him in the future and then they had a prolonged online correspondence.
Law enforcement charged Genevieve for stalking and harassing Alec Baldwin. There is a good deal of debate in the Pepino community about the exact nature of the subsequent jury trial. The consensus seems to be that Genevieve was unstable but that Alec and his new girlfriend Hilaria lied to implicate Genevieve with the crimes she was charged with. Why would they do that? We have already established that Hilaria and Alec will lie about many things for prolonged periods of time. Also, they both appear to have some weird personality issues.
What makes the most sense to me as a motive is that Genevieve’s relationship with Alec overlapped with Hilaria. Her existence made Alec look bad. Genevieve was loud and messy, and she was a former producer and PR person, so she had contacts in the press. She was willing to trash Alec and implicate him in not only two-timing his ex-wife Kim Basinger, who Alec had a long, infamous custody and divorce battle with, but also two-timing his current girlfriend Hilaria.
It’s also important context that in 2007, Alec’s nasty voicemail to his daughter with Kim Basinger, Ireland, had leaked. In the voicemail, Alec called his at the time 11-year-old daughter Ireland a “thoughtless pain in the ass” and a “rude, thoughtless little pig” among other vile invective. Alec was at a low ebb in terms of his relationship with the media. He was also getting sued for punching paparazzi on the street and calling them incredibly offensive names including many gay slurs. He would absolutely be canceled for what he did back then on a regular basis. Alec’s late night TV show Up Late with Alec Baldwin on MSNBC was also cancelled in November 2013 after Alec called the photographer a gay slur. With that context, we can see why the addition of this loose cannon in Genevieve was the last thing Alec needed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-25133549
There are fascinating clips that are still online like the below link to a thread on a 2013 TMZ interview that Genevieve did where she called out Hilaria for lying about her identity. Genevieve exposed Hilaria’s made-up Spanish backstory a full seven years before the facade finally crumbled in December 2020, but because Genevieve had marbles in her ass and was a loopy French Canadian stalker broad in the mind of the media, no one took her seriously enough to do a simple background check on Hilaria. Or, alternatively, a lot of people in the press knew about Hilaria’s manufactured backstory, but didn’t say anything for whatever reason.
In November 2013, Genevieve went to trial on charges of stalking and harassing the Baldwins. There are 13 stories I found that document the trial in November 2013 from just the New York Post. The media had a field day. It’s impossible to do the whole ordeal justice, but I’ll try to sum up the relevant facts here.
Genevieve had turned down a plea agreement where she would have served no jail time. Alec and Hilaria both ended up testifying in the trial, which was a complete circus. Genevieve did herself zero favors in the trial by constantly interjecting. She could not help herself from speaking in court, especially while Alec was on the stand. Genevieve called Alec a liar at one point. The judge admonished her many times and finally held her in contempt. Ultimately Genevieve was convicted of stalking and contempt and was sentenced to seven months in Rikers Island. A columnist for the Post, Andrea Peyser, called Baldwin “the Bloviator” and said she thought Baldwin lied on the stand. Peyser also called Genevieve’s sentence a “grave miscarriage of justice.”
Alec ended up giving a command performance on the stand and even turned on the waterworks. He also threw a producer friend of his under the bus. Alec said it was his pal, producer Martin Bregman, that had an affair with Genevieve. The story was that Alec did his buddy Martin Bregman a solid by meeting with Genevieve to get her help with an acting role. Bregman, who was on the witness list for the trial but did not end up testifying, told the Post that Alec Baldwin was lying about him having an affair with Genevieve and he would never speak to Baldwin again. Bregman was in his 80s at the time and the gist I got from his involvement was that he was completely disgusted with Alec’s behavior, and he was also shocked that Genevieve was convicted and sentenced to seven months in Rikers.
Alec’s story just does not hold water and even Alec’s doorman said that he recognized Genevieve as an ex-partner of Alec’s. There were multiple lines of evidence that Alec was not being truthful about his relationship with Genevieve. There were emails that Alec produced for trial claiming that they were Genevieve’s. The emails were damaging and made her look terrible, but they were not part of the official record. Apparently, the emails could not be verified to have an intact chain of custody. The rumor in the subreddit is that Alec and Hilaria may have manufactured these emails to frame Genevieve. Luckily for them, Genevieve cooked her own goose because if she had just stayed quiet and let her attorney work, she might have been acquitted. Alec said on the stand that he had stopped communicating with Genevieve shortly after their meeting in February 2010. But then Genevieve’s attorney showed Baldwin’s emails where he had been corresponding with Genevieve for many months. Alec had to acknowledge on cross examination that he did, in fact, stay in touch with her. In one of Alec’s emails to Genevieve, he told her to “wear protection” while she was meeting with another man which is a very curious comment to make to an alleged stalker.
It is also notable how crude the press was in 2013 to women. Reading the articles is almost like reading a news account from the 1950s in the way they described Genevieve in gendered language. She is called kooky, ditzy, and the Post referred to her as a “creepy accused stalker” in headlines. In the body of the articles, the newspapers described her in sexually charged language as “shapely” and “a pretty blond Canadian.” In a New York Post story titled “Alec Baldwin’s doorman thought ‘stalker’ was ex-partner” from November 6, 2013, the headline of the story was about how Baldwin’s doorman had confirmed a key detail of Genevieve’s story. This was ignored in favor of passages like this:
“It’s been the worst day of my life,” she said moments before touching up her makeup and sashaying out of the courthouse wearing a pink scarf and snug black dress. She laughed giddily as photographers snapped her picture.
https://nypost.com/2013/11/06/alec-baldwins-doorman-thought-stalker-was-ex-partner/
After Genevieve was released from prison, Alec and Hilaria made another report to the police that they had spotted Genevieve in front of their house. This turned out to be incorrect. There’s been much speculation on Reddit whether the Baldwins were trying to set up Genevieve for an even longer prison sentence. Luckily for Genevieve, she was up in Canada at the time and was eventually cleared of the incident.
Before we close the book on this weird tangent, I need to acknowledge again that Genevieve Sabourin has a ton of marbles in her ass. Many, many marbles. She is on Twitter and as I was scrolling through her feed, I noticed that she talks a lot about celebrities that she believes have secret HIV infections and wild tabloid fodder of that nature. There are genuine issues that she has as a witness in this case. She was also convicted of resisting arrest in Quebec in 2022 for yet another bizarre case that involved her mother’s conservatorship. My read on Genevieve is that she likely has some measure of very real trauma from the Alec Baldwin ordeal and from her long jail sentence.
There are also old screen grabs from the early Twitter era that allegedly show Alec Baldwin mobilizing his followers to terrorize Genevieve. She has obviously been through an incredibly stressful saga. She still regularly posts about Hilaria and Alec on social media. But there are several details of her story and the 2013 trial that do not reflect well on the Baldwins. Just because Genevieve is not a perfect witness does not mean she doesn’t have some valid points.
Resolution, or the part where my mother makes sense of Hilaria Baldwin
Amidst all the conspiracy randomness and tinfoil hattery, I was driving with my mom and explaining to her what I was writing about. I went on for several minutes about fake pregnancies and timelines and shapewear and surrogates. I often find that it helps to talk to people about what you’re writing about. You end up finding clarity in the focus of a conversation and what details people find interesting. You can also learn a lot about how to tell a story from the feedback you get or questions that come up organically during a chat about a complex topic. Also, my mom is the eldest daughter of an Irish Catholic family with nine children, so she knows a thing or two about child rearing and large families.
I was explaining how infuriating Hilaria was to people. It’s interesting trying to describe what a subreddit is or a message board to someone that’s not super familiar with niche internet subcultures. I muddled through a description of how there’s thousands of people online dedicated to hate following Hilaria and her family. I was also talking about how many people think that Hilaria and her PR reps have been astroturfing social media to move the conversation away from things like the surrogacy talk. My mom asked if Hilaria could also create fake haters, too. Sort of like a controlled opposition or loyal critic. These are concepts well-known in conspiracy literature relating to more serious conspiracy theories like the JFK assassination. Agent provocateurs.
I thought that this was a brilliant question. It was something that I hadn’t considered, but it had a kind of logic to it in the upside-down world where all publicity is good publicity. I’d have to imagine that the Baldwin PR machine has tried to pose as unhinged haters of Hilaria to make the subreddit and Pepino community look bad. In the post-Donald Trump era, the ability to create a narcissistic supply is the only thing that matters. In an attention economy, the only relevant metrics are views and impressions and engagement.
I started thinking about this and what the rational response should be to someone like Hilaria Baldwin. The Gray Rock Method is the only useful strategy I have come across for dealing with narcissists. The idea behind “Gray Rock-ing” a narcissist is you become part of the background, a boring gray rock. Don’t engage or, if you absolutely must, engage as minimally as possible in the most boring way possible. Don’t offer any opinion or invest anything with any emotion. Don’t feed into the narcissistic supply or the need of the narcissist for attention, good or bad.
Much in the same way, my conclusion after living deep in the Hilaria Baldwin rabbit warren for the last many months is that the only way to win is to refuse to play. I end up analogizing everything to Star Trek: The Next Generation, but this situation reminds me of one of my favorite episodes. I grew up out of step with pop culture in Southeast Alaska, but one of the few television shows I watched was Star Trek. The over-the-air public station KTOO played two episodes back-to-back on Saturday night.
The episode I have been thinking about is called “Peak Performance”. It’s one of the rare stand out episodes from season two. The theme of the main story arc is strategy. The guest star is an alien from the Zakdorn species named Sirna Kolrami. In the first segment of the show we hear all about how the Zakdorn are masters of warfare and are renowned for their skill as strategists. Kolrami is on the Enterprise to supervise a war games exercise. He’s acting as an observer who will evaluate the strategy and readiness of the crew. Captain Picard is to command the Enterprise against First Officer William Riker who is piloting the U.S.S. Hathaway, a much smaller starship. The goal of the simulated battle is for the crew to hone their skills.
Kolrami walks with bunched up shoulders and seems as if he is perpetually falling forward as he shuffles in a waddle. He wears a ghastly puke yellow tunic that’s made of the most uncomfortable, stiff looking fabric. Kolrami seems to channel early Woody Allen as his gaze swivels and his eyes scrunch in a nervous appraisal of his surroundings. The rubber prosthetics glued to the poor actor’s face are beyond unflattering. It is as if they spackled on a set of three bulges that hang like saddlebags on the midface.
The subplot of the episode is that Kolrami is a master at playing a game called strategema. In the first act, after setting up all of the exposition about why Kolrami is there and the war games exercise, Commander Riker challenges Kolrami to a game of strategema. It’s allegory for the overall theme of the episode, as Riker is vastly outmatched in the strategema game, just as he will be vastly outmatched in the war game exercise against the Enterprise later.
Riker and Kolrami sit down at a table in the lounge of the Enterprise. A crowd is milling and metallic-looking, hot dog-sized finger tubes are placed on the hands of Riker and Kolrami. The tubes have something looking like IV lines running from the tops of them. The game starts and a three-dimensional set of blue and yellow squares are shown which represent the progress of the players. Kolrami quickly overwhelms Riker, and the board changes from half blue and half yellow to all yellow and Kolrami’s fingers wiggle with alacrity. Kolrami’s smugness reminds me of Truman Capote mixed with the facial expressions and charisma of Debbie Downer.
Riker and his crew begin trying to spruce up their little rust bucket. Back on the Enterprise, Kolrami explains that the point of the exercise is that Star Fleet wants to know how the crew will fare when they’re facing a mismatch. The Federation had just encountered the ultimate big bad enemy of the series, the Borg, so the episode was also foreshadowing that conflict.
The android Data, the monotone guy with the white face paint, then plays Kolrami in a game of strategema and loses. Data ends up having the robot version of a crisis of conscience in that he feels he must be defective for not being able to use his superior processing power to defeat a human opponent. I think a lot of us have had similar self-pity sessions when thinking about how jerk offs like Hilaria Baldwin have been able to achieve such relative material success. The ship’s counselor, the vivacious Deanna Troi, tries to cheer Data up, but he explains that he made no mistakes in the game and now feels like he has to tear apart his positronic computer brain to diagnose what went wrong. It’s like when I feel like I’m on crazy pills because Wall Street creeps make billions while doctors and nurses are starving getting through medical school. Data has the ultimate form of imposter syndrome. He’s not sure if he’s damaged and he’s worried about not being able to give the Captain reliable advice. He might make a mistake. Captain Picard tells Data it is possible to make no mistakes and still lose. That’s not a weakness, that’s life.
After the main story is wrapped, we see Data and Kolrami in the rematch. Data redeemed himself and his confidence in the war game exercise. On opposite sides of the table, they wiggle their fingers to manipulate the controls of the game. A crowd forms again behind them in the lounge area of the starship Enterprise to watch the rematch of man versus machine. Data sits impassively. Only his eyes and his fingers move while his android brain whirs away. Kolrami looks exasperated. He purses his lips and wiggles his tongue, and his face becomes a rictus of intensity and frustration. We see a slight smile cross Data’s normally emotionless face. Finally, Kolrami explodes with rage and throws down his finger tubes and storms off. The gathered crewmembers wait a beat and then they crowd around the victorious Data in jubilation.
Data then tells the crew that the game was a stalemate. Worf, the Klingon head of security, explains in an awkward line of expository dialogue that “no game of strategema has ever gone this high.” Data says that he assumed that Kolrami was playing to win, so Data altered his strategy to play for a standoff. A draw. Data was able to pass up obvious avenues for advancement and settle for a balance.
The only way for Data to succeed was to refuse to engage on his opponent's terms. It is a profound lesson. I know I often get caught up in what other people think, so it’s a useful reminder that the things we can control are very limited. The internet makes it easy and attractive to get distracted by how terrible and insane people can be. Hilaria Baldwin is an emotional vampire. Her lifeblood is attention. I think the only way to drive a metaphorical stake through her black heart is to refuse to invite her into your social media feed.
Postscript: The Romper profile is the last time I will ever talk about Hilaria Baldwin. Until the next time I talk about Hilaria Baldwin.
As I was writing this way too long story, an article interviewing Hilaria came out in a publication called Romper. I must admit I am not familiar with the literary stylings of Romper but one can assume, based on the name, that it’s focused on motherhood. The interview is bonkers and caused a tremendous uproar on the subreddit. It’s the best reflection of outrage advertising that I could hope for in looking for a case study. The profile had to have gotten way more traction than anything Romper has even published. Good, bad or indifferent, a lot more people are now familiar with Romper. There’s a halo effect where now everyone is talking about Romper, myself included, and now I have mentioned Romper six times in this paragraph. Romper, Romper, Romper. The profile even goes there and mentions the fake pregnancy controversy and calls it fake news.
https://www.romper.com/parenting/hilaria-baldwin-children-cover
The profile has a lot of memetic details. Hilaria gives all her children two baths a day. She is moving on from the “whole cucumber thing”. Good for you, Hilaria, but the rest of the world is not. The photos of Hilaria and her children in the article are strangely muted with an earth tone palette provided by Naked Cashmere clothing, a direct to consumer brand. They charge $135 for a t-shirt, $325 for jogger sweats, $425 for a button up, $650 for a puffer vest and it goes up from there. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t browse the website longingly because they look like gorgeous clothes. If you’re hard up, you can always just go for the cashmere socks for $98, but you’ll also have to spring for shipping as the minimum order for free shipping is $100.
There is also a defensive passage about the “rotating cast of nannies and babysitters” and a description of how there are always a couple of nannies at the house to help. And then a parenthetical letting you know that it’s not fair to judge as this is, apparently, normal in New York City for this tax bracket, you pleb. Hilaria drives them part way to school and then goes to her “favorite barre class” which I also had to look up because I was not aware that barre, a combination of yoga, pilates, and ballet, was a thing.
Hilaria gives a bizarre-sounding explanation of why she used a surrogate for child number six. Then Hilaria says another absolute whopper: she doesn’t like using birth control because it makes her depressed. I don’t even know what to say to this, but it is just another log on the “the lady doth protest too much” bonfire. For someone constantly complaining about paparazzi, earlier in the profile she said her children are terrified of them, Hilaria has a maddening habit of over sharing. She’s like an emo teenager vaguebooking online, but it’s been going on for decades. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more fucked in the head person. But, again, it’s important to just put that away. I feel like this is the big goodbye and I’m getting it out of my system. This whole exercise is like the end of a toxic relationship where you burn all the possessions that link you to that previous version of yourself.
I say all of that, but in the next breath, she refers to having children as “creating love.” Every single sentence in this profile is more dumbfounding than the last. It’s the magazine equivalent of continually bashing yourself in the head with a tack hammer. Then Hilaria, towards the merciful end of this shit show, says that she’s hired private eyes to find out the identity of people who post about her on Reddit. I then watch parts of the YouTube video that accompanies the profile on Romper, but it is so cringe-inducing and bizarre I cannot make it through. The video opens with Hilaria holding her leg above her head while pouring a glass of wine and talking. Hilaria is speaking with her fake accent and doing yoga poses and “multi-tasking” by lifting tiny, lavender-colored dumbbells. She seems like she could be on amphetamines. It’s all so stage managed. I hate the idea of her, but I see her as a projection of this black mirror reality. We are all mimics and influenced by the things we see, which is why I find the constant focus on the most raging narcissists so objectionable. It ends up creating more of what we reward. The world is now set up as an elaborate machine, through technology and infrastructure and language and AI, to create assholes. I’m surrounded by assholes. I am becoming one myself. And the only solution is to ignore the assholes who are everywhere. But in the end, you cannot ignore yourself.
Well this was stellar, Leo. I loved your mom's thoughts on the situation, too. Your writing is *IT* my guy. Thank you for the deeply-researched and thought out piece! I cannot wait for your next take.
I was thrilled when I saw this land in my inbox. The Pepino community is so intense and there’s so much to take in — you did a great job in converting it into a long read and breaking down into the piles of paper on the floor. Can’t wait for the next instalment of snark history (I came via SmolBeanSnark).