Hilaria Baldwin Laughs Off Troll, Opens Up About ADHD and Dyslexia

Hilaria Baldwin is turning an internet troll’s intended insult into a lighthearted moment of self-acceptance.

The 42-year-old mother of seven posted an Instagram video to share a funny mishap regarding a negative comment left on her page. Baldwin explained that a follower called her “vacuous” — a word her dyslexia caused her to initially misread as the compliment “vivacious.” 

Finding humor in the mix-up, she joked in her caption that she needed a dictionary to figure out she was being insulted. “POV: you have to do a Google search before you can even be offended by the hate comment,💀” she wrote, adding: “Whatever, my dyslexia and ADHD read that as vivacious anyways.😜”

This isn’t the first time she’s spoken out about her neurodivergence. In her memoir, Manual Not Included, Baldwin shares how living with ADHD and dyslexia affects her self-confidence, memory, listening abilities, and speech.

“I have a brain that is one part English, one part Spanish, seven dollops of mom brain, a heavy pour of distraction when I get stuck or go off on tangents and forget what I am saying while I am saying it,” she wrote.

She also attributes her fluctuating accent, and the highly publicized 2020 scandal surrounding it (including a viral 2015 clip of her forgetting the English word for cucumber on The Today Show), to her ADHD and “processing differences.” 

Following the fallout, she used her memoir as a protective shield — a space to thoughtfully voice her experiences without the immediate pressure of going “live.”

“Can you be honest right now, reading this: Have you ever forgotten a word?” Baldwin wrote.

Still, she says the backlash caused her to feel “lost” and “confused.” 

“I’d sit on my bathroom floor, nursing my baby Edu at 3 a.m., and speak to my brother in Spain, and I’d cry to him, nauseous about it all,” she wrote. “He’d try to lighten things up by saying, ‘Can we just stop for a second and talk about how nonsensical this is? You’re speaking to me in Spain, where I’ve lived for most of my life, in Spanish, about the validity of our connection to Spain. No one is really offended — it’s COVID, and they are home alone and bored, and there is so much misinformation.’”

Her husband, Alec Baldwin, also stepped in to offer support. Having faced his own public controversies, the actor used his personal experiences to provide genuine empathy and comfort.

Ultimately, getting proper treatment for ADHD allowed her to manage her distractions and separate the two languages. She also decided to stop attempting to fix every flaw that internet critics pointed out, realizing she was never broken to begin with.

“I tried to improve myself in all the ways the internet trolls had told me I was broken,” she wrote in the book. “And then I got to the point where I realized: This is not helping me. I am mixed-up, but I am not bad or broken. And then Hilaria returned.”

“I am relieved that now there’s less of a stigma around differences in learning and processing,” she continued. “This has given me the freedom to shed some of the shame I felt for so long. I’m now aware that my brain just works differently and I can really succeed in the right environments and tasks.”