Lilly Jay's Essay on Her Divorce From Ethan Slater Deserves Better ...

Dr. Lilly Jay is a clinical psychologist who specializes in perinatal mental health and child development. This week, she penned a very moving essay for The Cut about her experiences with divorce and postpartum troubles. It’s a beautiful and detailed piece that details how Jay was forced to navigate a painful period of her life in an unexpectedly public manner. You might have heard about it because Jay was previously married to actor Ethan Slater, who is now in a relationship with Ariana Grande. The pair met while filming Wicked and news of their romance became immediately controversial over allegations that he left his wife and newborn son for the singer after a possible affair.

Jay’s essay is not designed to fuel that gossip, which has continued for well over a year. She does detail a timeline of events that will undoubtedly be picked apart for evidence like the Zapruder film, including notes on how she had a difficult pregnancy and moved to a new country with Slater and their newborn so that he could shoot Wicked two months after their son’s birth. Still, that is not the purpose of her work. It’s primarily about her unique and volatile experience of going from a woman whose work and personality prize privacy to being forced to ‘work diligently on my private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of my marriage.’ It is, she says, ‘nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide.’ She’s right. Becoming the main character of the week is a terrifying prospect even for those who seek the spotlight, but being thrown into the ring as a non-celebrity who works on matters of explicit privacy, and to do so during a separation, must have been overwhelming.

You should read the piece. It’s really something special and I think Dr. Jay should be commended for opening up in a way that is honest, helpful, and recentres the narrative. I’m also horribly aware that it won’t be read as such by a hell of a lot of people. I can already see the TikToks and Tumblr posts hyper-analysing it as part of an ongoing fandom battle fuelled by delusion and the sunk cost fallacy.

Ariana Grande is a very popular performer with a highly dedicated fanbase. They are wildly devoted to and protective of her in a way that often seems extreme even to other stans. Many of them were not kind to Jay when it was revealed that Grande and Slater were together. They reviled her for ‘attacking’ Grande when tabloid sources claimed that Jay had said Grande was ‘not a girl’s girl.’ She was subjected to monstrous cruelty and misogyny for the crime of having been someone’s wife. It’s still going on. Responses to this essay by some more virulent Arianators have regurgitated the same claims of anti-Ariana biases and bullying of a 30-something multi-millionaire. Some are claiming that Jay timed the piece to kill Grande’s Oscar campaign for Wicked, an argument that suggests to me that a lot of people don’t know how publishing works (spoiler: the writer doesn’t set the deadline or publication dates.) I’d hazard a guess that many of these fans haven’t read the full piece, or only did so to find potential fodder for their theories.

It’s not just the stans though. Everyone has opinions on cheaters, alleged or confirmed, and it’s an especially potent gossip narrative that even celebrity culture novices can indulge in. When a famous person is accused of infidelity, or proven to have been adulterous, it inspires a kind of moral crusade alongside the expected trash talk. Consider John Mulaney, a man who is now married with two children to Olivia Munn but still has to face almost parodic levels of fury from those who believe he cheated on his ex-wife Annemarie Tendler, a claim that has never been proven and frankly doesn’t make sense when you lay out the timeline of his life. Still, there’s a lot of attention to be plundered from going on TikTok to address your ‘besties’ and flog a dead horse for years on end. Everyone hates cheaters but they love the drama.

Fame is not something everyone seeks, and becoming a celebrity, however minor, when you did not desire or attract it puts you into an impossible position. Maybe you’re Dr. Jay and have to deal with a public split because of your ex and his new partner. Or perhaps you were drunk and made a sex joke on TikTok that went astonishingly viral. Someone might have filmed you without your permission or live-tweeted a perfectly mundane daily interaction to spin it into a fevered love story you weren’t participating in. Whatever the case, being thrust into this harsh limelight gives you few options. You can ignore it, but when everyone is talking about you, demanding answers from you, and making money from you, how can you resist the very human temptation to speak out? Sure, the sex joke was bad but why not hustle and profit? There are talk-show hosts inviting you to interviews, sponsored content to shill, podcasts to record. Everyone’s calling you a bitch, a liar, the ‘real’ villain of the story, and you have to have elephant hide-thick skin to not be hurt by it, to not want to course-correct on something that’s tearing your life apart. If Dr. Jay had gone on Good Morning America or done a 45-part TikTok series on her marriage breakdown, would you have blamed her?

If Lilly Jay had done any of this stuff, it still wouldn’t have made her the bad guy in her own story. But she hasn’t, and her careful silence and nervy response to the messiness her private life has become mired in deserves better than to be relitigated by stans and vultures as the next arc in their soap opera. Gossiping is natural and expected, but there is a clear line in the sand here. If we learned anything from the Mulaney drama then surely it’s the perils of parasocial tedium and projecting onto a detailed canvas that holds no space for your own speculations. Sometimes a spade is just a spade, the thing happened, and you don’t need to attack a private citizen to uphold a story that no longer makes sense. Frankly, if the only way you can enjoy being a fan of someone is by screeching that a total stranger is an ‘attention seeker’ or ‘b*tch’ for speaking her truth, maybe you should find a new hobby.