Wicked star Ethan Slater’s ex-wife Lilly Jay breaks silence on his romance with Ariana Grande

Ethan Slater’s ex-wife Lilly Jay penned an emotional essay detailing her painful divorce as she watched him move on with his Wicked costar Ariana Grande.

In an essay for The Cut, published on Thursday, the clinical psychologist, who shares a two-year-old son with Slater, reflected on navigating life as a single mom and the end of her more than decade-long relationship. 

‘Motherhood, I have learned, fills your time but not your mind,’ she wrote. ‘In the countless hours I spend rocking my son to sleep, pushing his stroller, marveling at his sweaty little hands grasping a crayon, I work diligently on my private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of my marriage.’ 

She continued: ‘This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide.’ 

Jay also reflected how nobody ‘one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced, in the same way we don’t board a plane expecting to crash.’ 

‘But I really never thought I would get divorced. Especially not just after giving birth to my first child and especially not in the shadow of my husband’s new relationship with a celebrity,’ Jay noted, alluding to his relationship with Grande. 

She went on to write: ‘In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health.’ 

Despite their split, she still praised Slater for being a wonderful co-parent as she stated that while their ‘partnership has changed’ their ‘parenthood has not.’

‘Both of us fiercely love our son 100 percent of the time, regardless of how our parenting time is divided,’ she emphasized. 

Jay explained that while ‘people from [her] past have reached out to say they saw my face in a tabloid’ that her ‘patients have remained silent’ about it. 

‘At the Children’s Hospital, my invisibility was welcome protection from hard conversations for me and my patients,’ she said. ‘And while I still firmly believe in following my patients’ leads and not presuming to know what parts of my personhood resonate with them, the publicity I did not consent to increasingly feels like both a challenge and an opportunity.’ 

‘If I’m discovered — as what, being vulnerable? — perhaps it could be a point of connection rather than a clinical liability,’ she added. 

At her lowest, she said that she ‘feared that loss of control and postpartum depression would destroy’ her for her ‘entire adult life.’ 

Additionally, Jay noted that her career has seemingly been affected by her and Slater’s public fallout. 

‘It’s hard to measure an absence, and I can’t say for sure how much my career has been impacted by what’s out there online,’ she wrote. ‘But there have been hints along the way, like the job offer that dissolved without explanation after yet another tabloid news cycle or the patient who’s scheduled for a first appointment but seemingly vanishes.’

This has, admittedly, left her, on ‘darker’ days to stew angrily on ‘the unfairness of a public divorce.’  

‘Slowly but surely, I have come to believe that in the absence of the life I planned with my high-school sweetheart, a lifetime of sweetness is waiting for me and my child,’ she told readers. 

Jay proceeded to explain that if she ‘can’t be invisible anymore’ that she thought it was time to properly ‘introduce’ herself to the world.

‘You know how a sponge is most effective at absorbing liquid when it’s already a bit wet? Maybe we can think about my messy not-so-personal life in that way: a dose of my own loss, rage, powerlessness, sadness that helps me hold yours,’ she concluded. 

Earlier in her essay, she noted that during her pregnancy she had ‘never felt happier nor more aware of how precarious happiness could be.’ 

‘I survived preeclampsia, a life-threatening birth complication, and finally, our family was whole. Mine is a story of worrying in the wrong direction,’ she recalled.

Despite understanding how hard the postpartum period can be on a marriage, Jay said she ‘confidently moved to another country’ her then-two-month-old baby and husband to ‘support his career.’ 

Jay and Slater officially finalized their divorce in September after separating last year. 

Slater filed for divorce on July 26, 2023, five years after he tied the knot with Jay, who he began dating when they were both just teenagers. 

At the time, Grande was still married to Dalton Gomez; she filed for divorce in September 2023 and listed the date of separation as February 20, 2023. 

Ariana’s divorce was settled in October 2023, with the performer making a single $1,250,000 payment to Gomez in lieu of spousal support.

She also paid $25k of the real estate broker’s attorney fees.

Grande and Slater met in December 2022 on the UK set of the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked, in which Ariana plays Glinda — the good witch — alongside Ethan as munchkin Boq.

Both parties announced they had split from their spouses within a few days of each other.

Ariana announced her separation from Dalton just three days before confirming her new relationship with Ethan, who then filed for divorce from Lilly.

He cited irreconcilable differences and asked for joint custody of their two-year-old son.  

Lilly later damned Ariana in a series of disparaging interviews, telling Page Six the music artist is ‘not a girl’s girl’ and adding that ‘my family is just collateral damage’ to her.

 In October, Slater addressed the backlash over his and Grande’s relationship amid  infidelity rumors. 

‘I think there was something that was really difficult about things in your private life being commented on and looked at by the public,’ he told GQ.

He continued: ‘There were a lot of big changes in private lives that were really happening, so it’s really hard to see people who don’t know anything about what’s happening commenting on it.’ 

Last month, Grande insisted that ‘there couldn’t be a less accurate depiction of a human being than the one that the tabloids spread about him [Slater].’

‘No one on this earth tries harder or spreads themselves thinner to be there for the people that he loves and cares about,’ she told Vanity Fair.