Lilly Jay, the ex-wife of “Wicked” actor Ethan Slater, is sharing her tackle the previous couple’s extremely scrutinized divorce for the primary time publicly.
In a prolonged essay printed by The Minimize on Thursday, Jay acknowledged she’d skilled “a season of shock and mourning” following the top of her marriage that had been exacerbated by the media frenzy over Slater’s romance along 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.”
Jay, a medical psychologist specializing in girls’s well being, notably doesn’t point out Slater or Grande by identify all through the piece. Nonetheless, she suggests her grief has been mitigated by her duties as a mother to the 2-year-old son she shares with Slater.
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“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 notice: “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.”
Previous to his efficiency as Boq within the movie model of “Wicked,” Slater was primarily recognized as a stage actor, having earned a Tony Award nomination for his efficiency in “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.” He and Jay had been married in November 2018 and welcomed their son in 2022.
Information of Slater’s romance with Grande ― who was recent off her cut up from actual property agent Dalton Gomez, to whom she’d been married for 2 years ― broke in July 2023, and he filed for divorce from Jay shortly thereafter. Although experiences of their separation timeline range, Jay and Slater had maintained the looks of a dedicated couple till then.
Slater, for his half, alluded briefly to the cut up in an interview with GQ printed in October.
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“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 instructed 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.”
That very same month, Grande pushed again on the rumors of infidelity on Slater’s behalf in an interview with Self-importance Honest.
“No one on this earth tries harder or spreads themselves thinner to be there for the people that he loves and cares about,” she stated. “There is no one on earth with a better heart, and that is something that no bullshit tabloid can rewrite in real life.”
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Elsewhere in her essay, Jay contemplated the impact the general public consideration on her cut up may need had on her profession, noting latest situations wherein she’d misplaced potential shoppers and a job provide. Nonetheless, she stated 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.”
