Hilaria Baldwin Said "Cancel Culture" Leads To Suicide In A Series Of Instagram Videos Where She Asked People To Stop "Judging Everybody All The Time"
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Warning: This post contains mentions of suicide.
Hilaria Baldwin spoke about how the consequences of "cancel culture" can degrade a person's mental health, and encouraged folks on social media to lend "support" to whomever is being cancelled, in several video messages that she shared on Instagram Stories yesterday.
"When you see somebody getting attacked by the online mob or any kind of cancel culture, instead of scrolling past, or worse, getting involved, reach out to them and just tell them that you support them as a human," she said. "You don't have to agree with them 100%. You don't have to even understand what they're attacking them for."
"This idea of nitpicking and having partial information and taking things out of context...or even when people completely disappoint you. It is not for us to come to be judging everybody all the time."
"It's absolutely impossible to make absolutely everybody happy and to be in alignment with everybody. We're more divided than ever," Hilaria continued. "But I can tell you that this kind of attack is mental torture. As humans, we are not built for it. We're driving each other crazy."
Hilaria noted how spreading hate about someone over the internet can result in death by suicide — and she's correct, as lots of studies have linked cyberbullying to self-harm and suicide, especially among adolescents. "We're driving people to the place where they want to commit suicide. Where they're losing their mental health," she said.
"And this is not fair. It's not good. So reach out to them, and just tell them that you're thinking about them to try to stabilize them."
Hilaria's posts come after months of public backlash against her husband, Alec Baldwin, who fired a prop gun that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust. The incident also left director Joel Souza wounded.
The Instagram videos also came on the heels of a new report by New Mexico's Occupational Health and Safety Bureau (OSHB), which concluded the producers of Rust, including Alec, knowingly disregarded gun safety procedures during filming and fined the production company nearly $140,000.
Alec's attorney claimed that OSHB's report "exonerates" him in a statement that the actor recently posted to his own Instagram page. But the bureau's investigation — required by federal law because the shooting happened at a worksite — took place alongside criminal investigations that are still ongoing. No criminal charges have been announced.
Hilaria has faced her share of online criticism, too. Back in December of 2020, the former yoga instructor and mom of seven was accused of faking her heritage and cultural appropriation. Who can forget that time she asked, "How do you say, cucumber?"
After it was revealed that Hilaria was actually born with the name "Hillary," in Boston and not Mallorca, Spain, as public perception believed, she alleged that these errors in reports about her early life were honest mistakes. "There is not something I'm doing wrong," she told the New York Times. "And I think there is a difference between hiding and creating a boundary."
She also said her accent fluctuates when she is "nervous or upset" because she is bilingual. Eight months later, she attempted to explain her cultural "fluidity," as she put it, by saying, "We all get to curate our individual expressions of our cultures, languages, who we love, what we believe in, how we dress, present ourselves."
What's your impression of Hilaria's new Instagram videos? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health and thoughts of suicide, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is at1-866-488-7386.
