Ethan Slater's ex-wife reflects on divorce 'in the shadow' of his new romance 'with a celebrity'
Lilly Jay, the psychologist ex-wife of Ethan Slater, reflected on their divorce and how she contended with private life going public amid the actor's rumored affair with Ariana Grande.
In a Dec. 18 essay for The Cut, Jay said no 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," 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."
The doctor was alluding to Grande, whom Slater met during the filming of Wicked in late 2022 and started dating in early 2023.
Jay also talked about her job as a therapist, whose part of what she can offer patients "was the experience of being in relation with someone else without the complexities of a personal relationship."
"I was never meant to be fully known to them," she said.
As a non-celebrity, Jay also looked back into the "life of invisibility" she had before her marriage was made public.
"I loved my life working in a helping profession and being immersed in the details of other people’s stories rather than documenting my own narrative for public consumption," she said.
She remembered deactivating her Facebook a week before her 18th birthday, saying she didn't want to measure her birthday in how many messages she wrote and received from loved ones and strangers.
"Becoming a psychologist solidified my detachment from social media," she said. "Professors urged me and my graduate school peers to be wary of the conclusions an understandably curious patient might reach if they were to unearth online artifacts of our real-world lives."
Without mentioning Slater, Jay said her partner "was on a different path, in which social media and exposure were not impediments but rather necessities."
"We puzzled through this predicament on walks, over pizza, in our apartment and excitedly concocted rules of engagement of how and what he would share about our lives together," she said, adding it was a "tenuous balance" since her profession requires privacy while his was "measured in applause."
Nevertheless, Jay noted that "it worked well while life was unfolding according to our plans."
After giving birth to her son in 2022, during which she also survived a life-threatening birth complication called preeclampsia—while armed with knowledge about the vulnerability of marriage postpartum—Jay said she "confidently" moved to another country with Slater to support his career.
"Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us," she said.
She noted that motherhood fills one's time but not the mind.
As she cared for her son, Jay said she worked "diligently on my private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of my marriage."
"This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide," she said. "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."
Jay, without mentioning Slater, noted that though 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 said.
While her days with their son are sunny, Jay said her days are darker when she can't "escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life."
Though her divorce was highly publicized, even to the point of her face being in the tabloids, Jay said her patients remained silent.
"Was some algorithmic or karmic force protecting my patients from seeing a tabloid drama in which I play the role of a voiceless ex-wife?" she said. "Or did they know about my divorce and didn’t know it’s okay to tell me?"
Jay also wondered how much her career has been impacted by what’s out there online. She cited instances like a job offer that dissolved without explanation after another tabloid news cycle and a patient who's scheduled for a first appointment but seemingly vanishes.
She said that she rallied against the unfairness of a public divorce, discussing it with her therapist.
"Of course, I am not owed anything, whether it be a job or the privilege of being any given person’s psychologist," she said. "Still, even as someone who spent years researching how people respond to ambiguity, I hate not knowing if the way my story has been told has impacted my opportunity to help others sort through their stories."
Though her "invisibility" at work is a "welcome protection" from hard conversations among patients, she said the publicity she didn't 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 said.
"If I can’t be invisible anymore, I may as well introduce myself," she continued. "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."
Jay said maybe it's time to accept that she's not unknown anymore.
Concluding her essay, she called it a message in a bottle to her patients.
She apologized that she couldn't be invisible anymore, and hoped that it's okay if their psychologist "had a window into her life pried open."
Still, Jay reassured them.
"Knowing what you now know, I can say with both personal and professional authority, you are so much stronger than you assume," she said. "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."
Jay and Slater started dating in 2012 and got married in 2018. They separated in 2023, and their divorce was finalized last September.
Grande, meanwhile, dated Slater shortly after her divorce from Dalton Gomez.
