Ethan Slater's Ex-Wife Lilly Jay Writes Essay About Their Divorce

Ethan Slater’s ex-wife, Dr. Lilly Jay, is opening up about how the pair’s highly publicized split affected her.

“No one gets married thinking they’ll get divorced … 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 wrote in an essay for The Cut titled “How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?” The title of the piece, which was published on Thursday, December 19, nods to Jay’s work as a therapist.

Slater, 32, filed for divorce in July 2023, one month shy of his and Jay’s son’s first birthday. That same month, news broke of Slater’s romance with his Wicked costar Ariana Grande. Jay admitted to struggling with the ubiquity of the Wicked press tour in her essay.

“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 wrote.

Jay recalled the “distance” that grew between her and Slater as they navigated raising a newborn while he was filming part one of Wicked, which hit theaters in November. (Slater met Grande, 31, on the set of the film in December 2022.)

“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 — but I confidently moved to another country with my 2-month-old baby and my husband to support his career,” she wrote. “Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.”

When her and Slater’s divorce made headlines, Jay began to “deeply miss the life of invisibility” she intentionally created for the sake of her patients. Despite her wish to never be “fully known” by the people in her care, strangers suddenly knew intimate details about Jay’s life.

After mourning that seismic shift, Jay tried to think of a way that her own experiences might help her patients, whom she notes have so far “remained silent” about her public divorce.

“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 wrote. “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.”

On a similarly hopeful note, Jay shared that she has “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.”

The psychologist also emphasized that she and Slater both “fiercely love our son 100 percent of the time, regardless of how our parenting time is divided.”

When news of Grande and Slater’s relationship first broke, some people speculated that Slater had cheated on Jay with the pop star. Grande and Slater have both suggested that the narrative is false.

“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,” Slater said of the situation during an October interview with GQ.

Grande, meanwhile, told Vanity Fair in September that it was “disappointing” to “see so many people believe the worst version” of events.