Lilly Jay, the ex-wife of Wicked actor Ethan Slater, is sharing her take on the former couple’s highly-scrutinised divorce for the first time publicly.
In a lengthy essay published by The Cut on Thursday, Lilly acknowledged she’d experienced “a season of shock and mourning” following the end of her marriage, which had been exacerbated by the media frenzy over her ex-husband’s romance with his Wicked co-star Ariana Grande.
“No one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced, in the same way we don’t board a plane expecting to crash,” she wrote.
“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.”
Lilly, a clinical psychologist specialising in women’s health, notably does not mention Ethan or Ariana by name throughout the piece. Still, she suggests her grief has been mitigated by her duties as a mother to the two-year-old son she shares with the Tony nominee.
“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 wrote.
“While our partnership has changed, our parenthood has not. Both of us fiercely love our son 100 percent of the time, regardless of how our parenting time is divided.”
She went on to note: “As for me, days with my son are sunny. Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker.”
Prior to his performance as Boq in the film version of Wicked, Ethan was primarily known as a stage actor, most notably for his performance in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical and Spamalot. He and Lilly were married in November 2018, and welcomed their son in 2022.
News of Ethan’s romance with Ariana – who was fresh off her own split from real estate agent Dalton Gomez, to whom she’d been married for two years ― broke in July 2023, and he filed for divorce from Lilly shortly thereafter.
Though reports of their separation timeline vary, Lilly and Ethan had maintained the appearance of a committed couple until then.
Ethan, for his part, alluded briefly to the split in an interview with GQ published in October.
“Obviously, it was a really super big year, and 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.
“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 and speculating, and then getting things wrong about the people you love.”
Earlier that month, Ariana had pushed back on the rumours of infidelity on Ethan’s behalf in an interview with Vanity Fair.
“No one on this earth tries harder or spreads themselves thinner to be there for the people that he loves and cares about,” she said.
“There is no one on earth with a better heart, and that is something that no bullshit tabloid can rewrite in real life.”
Elsewhere in her own essay, Lilly pondered the effect the public attention on her split might have had on her career, noting recent instances in which she’d lost prospective clients and a job offer.
Still, she said she hoped others would see in her story a reminder that “you are so much stronger than you assume”.
“My entire adult life, I feared that loss of control and postpartum depression would destroy me. One day in London, I looked up and found that they had both arrived,” she wrote. “And I am OK.”