Lilly Jay, the ex of “Wicked” star Ethan Slater, addressed her headline-making split with the actor in a new essay.
Published in The Cut Dec. 19, Jay addressed the impact of her public split on her career as a clinical psychologist.
“I really never thought I would get divorced,” she said. “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.”
In 2023, outlets reported that co-stars Ariana Grande and Slater, who were previously married to other people, had started a relationship during the filming of “Wicked.” In July 2023, TODAY.com confirmed the co-stars’ relationship three days after confirming that Grande and her husband at the time, Dalton Gomez, separated.
Slater and Jay married in 2018 and welcomed a son in August 2022, per People. Around the time of the reports of Slater and Grande’s relationship, a source also confirmed to TODAY.com that Slater and Jay had separated.
Jay does not specifically name Grande, Slater or the project they worked on together in her essay, titled, “How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?” TODAY.com has reached out to representatives for Grande and Slater for comment.
She described welcoming her son as feeling like her “family was whole,” after being diagnosed with preeclampsia but said, in hindsight, “Mine is a story of worrying in the wrong direction.”
“As a perinatal psychologist, I knew all the statistics — how vulnerable a marriage is in the postpartum period, how vital community connection is in preventing depression and anxiety, how new parenthood impacts a whole family,” she said. “But I confidently moved to another country with my 2-month-old baby and my husband to support his career.” (“Wicked” was filmed in England and started production in December 2022, Billboard reported, citing Instagram stories posted by director Jon M. Chu, Cynthia Erivo and Grande.)
Jay does not directly address when and how her marriage ended but said, “Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.”
“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,” she said.
She referred to her ex as a her “high-school sweetheart.”
“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 said.
In her professional life as a psychologist with a focus on helping pregnant women with babies facing diseases, she wrote that she loved “being immersed in the details of other people’s stories rather than documenting my own narrative for public consumption.”
She reflected that, “I can’t say for sure how much my career has been impacted by what’s out there online.” But now, “the publicity I did not consent to increasingly feels like both a challenge and an opportunity,” she wrote.
“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. And I am okay,” she said.
“If I can’t be invisible anymore, I may as well introduce myself,” she added.
Dubbing the essay a “message in a bottle sent out to sea to maybe wash up at my patients’ feet someday,” she apologized for no longer being “invisible” to the people she works with before sharing a few takeaways.
“Knowing what you now know, I can say with both personal and professional authority, you are so much stronger than you assume. Some of what you loved most about your partner was actually your own goodness reflected back to you; it’s yours to keep and carry forward,” she wrote. “I’d tell you (and myself) to let go of the worries — our anxious minds are creative but not particularly good guessers about the future.”
While promoting “Wicked,” which premiered in theaters Nov. 22, Slater and Grande briefly discussed their relationship in interviews.
“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,” Slater told GQ in October.
For her part, Vanity Fair reported that Grande “disputes specific allegations” about her relationship with Slater in an interview.
“The most disappointing part was to see so many people believe the worst version of it,” Grande said. “There couldn’t be a less accurate depiction of a human being than the one that the tabloids spread about him …”