Hilaria Baldwin "wanted to be dead" when people questioned her Spanish heritage.
The 41-year-old star - who has been married to Hollywood star Alec Baldwin, 67, since 2012 - was born in Boston, Massachusetts but spent a lot of her childhood in Spain and is fluent in the language so began to doubt her own intelligence when fans accused her of "faking" her seemingly natural ability so switch between US and Spanish dialects.
In an extract from her new book 'Manual Not Included' as obtained by PEOPLE, she said: "Now, I know that it’s ridiculous that anyone would feel outraged or amused because someone forgot a word. Can you be honest right now, reading this: Have you ever forgotten a word? But back then, I started to really unravel. I was confused.
"I felt lost. I missed my family.
"I couldn’t eat. I got very thin. I started to question my sanity. I started to question if I was a good person. I returned to what I used to do as a child, and started to call myself stupid. When I woke up, I wanted to be dead. And I got worse and worse and worse."
The 'Baldwins' star - who has Carmen, 11, Rafael, nine, Leonardo, eight, Romeo, six, Eduardo and María Lucía, both four, and two-year-old Ilaria with Alec - recalled sitting on her bathroom floor in the middle of the night and would "cry" to her brother on the phone and insisted that it was simply the "boredom" of the COVID-19 pandemic that had caused such outrage.
She said: "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. 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."
