Hilaria Baldwin’s children were once very lucrative.
The reality star, 41, admitted she once accepted $95,000 in exchange for the rights to the first photo of her then newborn daughter, Carmen.
“I sold the first photos of the first few kids,” Baldwin said on a Wednesday episode of The Viall Files podcast. “I donated all the money to charity, because it just felt like a gross thing anyway.”
The Dancing With the Stars alum, who shares seven children with husband Alec Baldwin, clarified that she later donated the money. Baldwin also said she made the decision because paparazzi were already “harassing” her family in hopes of getting their own photos of baby Carmen.
“I found that the more I tried to hide them, the more paparazzi there were,” said Baldwin. “The culture, even though 12 years ago is not a long time, it was very different back then.”
“I donated [the $95,000] to an organization in Mallorca, where my family lives, for children who have been sexually abused,” says Baldwin. “Someone’s going to make money off of this, whether it’s someone who’s chasing me down the street, or this system. There’s money to be had, and I’m going to put that in a good place.”
Baldwin added that being chased by paparazzi after Carmen’s birth was causing “tremendous mental distress” to Alec, 67, who “has a lot of trauma.” “It would really bother him, and get us into not-fun situations,” she explained.
While Baldwin didn’t elaborate on those “not-fun situations,” her husband has had multiple public altercations with paparazzi in the past. Just days after Carmen’s birth in August 2013, the actor was photographed grabbing and shoving a photographer in Manhattan before pinning the man against a car.
Two months later, TMZ caught video of him chasing another photographer down the sidewalk after the man attempted to photograph baby Carmen through a car window. The video appeared to show Baldwin calling the photographer a homophobic slur, though the actor later denied that claim.
Baldwin was also accused of assaulting paparazzi at least four times before Carmen’s birth. In 1995, the actor was arrested for battery after he allegedly punched a photographer who had attempted to snap a picture of his then-newborn elder daughter, Ireland.
In 2012, another photographer accused Baldwin of punching his camera while leaving City Hall after obtaining his marriage license with Hilaria. Baldwin maintains that the photographer was the aggressor.
Later that same year, Baldwin was captured on video grabbing the arm of another paparazzo outside of his New York home and telling the photographer to “shut the f*** up.”
In February 2013, while Hilaria was pregnant with Carmen, Baldwin was accused of grabbing a New York Post reporter’s arm and saying he wanted to “choke [her] to death,” before calling her Black colleague a series of racial epithets.
While Hilaria Baldwin didn’t reveal how much paparazzi were willing to pay for photos of her other children, she has since stopped selling them.
“It became less of a thing as I had more children,” she told Viall Files host Nick Viall. “I just started Instagramming them, and it went from tons of people trying to get this photo to I put it on there, I’m not going to get chased around as much.”
The former yoga instructor also said that a friend who is “much more famous than [her]” advised her that “the more that you put the photo up, the lower the bounty is, and the less harassment you get.”
Since Carmen’s birth in 2013, the Baldwins have welcomed six more children: sons Rafael, 10, Leonardo, 8, Romeo, 7, and Eduardo, 5, and daughters María Lucía, 4, and Ilaria, 2. Alec Baldwin also shares daughter Ireland, 30, with ex-wife Kim Basinger.
