Ariana Grande and Ethan Slater were at the centre of the Wicked press tour. His ex-wife just shared her side.

Lilly Jay didn't want to be famous. In fact, she spent her career trying to do the opposite.

But this year, her face and story were blasted across every corner of the internet when reports came out that her husband, Ethan Slater, had started dating his Wicked co-star, Ariana Grande.

Slater filed for divorce from Jay on July 26, 2024. Lilly had given birth to their son in August 2022.

Filming for the movie musical began in December 2022 and officially wrapped up in January 2024.

The timeline of Ethan and Lilly's split remains somewhat hazy, with Lilly referring to the pop star as "not a girl's girl" at the time — a comment she has since said she regretted.

And now as the Wicked press tour comes to an end, with Ethan and Ariana still going strong, Lilly Jay has penned a personal essay for The Cut to shed light on what this past year has been like for her.

Ethan Slater and Ariana Grande at the Wicked Los Angeles premiere. Image: Getty.

The story was headlined 'As a therapist, I try to keep my personal life private. After my public split, that was no longer in my control.'

In the beautifully written essay, Jay didn't go too much into the cheating allegations, but she did share some choice words about what happened and how it made her feel.

"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. 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 essay began.

She recounted how something shifted in her marriage to Ethan.

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

Lilly Jay and Ethan Slater. Image: Ethan Slater/Instagram

"Motherhood, I have learned, fills your time but not your mind. In the countless hours I spend rocking my son to sleep, pushing his stroller, marvelling at his sweaty little hands grasping a crayon, I work 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. 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. 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."

In her most vulnerable moment, Lilly admitted how hard it's been trying to move on from her life when the Wicked press tour was raging on and being plastered across social media.

"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.

Watch The Spill's Laura Brodnik interview Cynthia and Ariana. Post continues after video.

But it was the focus of the article that was most affecting: Lily James is a psychologist whose career has been irrevocably impacted by her identity being released to the masses.

"In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself," she wrote.

"As a therapist, part of what I could offer my 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."

Lily has spent her life trying to maintain some level of anonymity, even deleting her Facebook profile at an early age.

As the more unforgiving corners of the internet might question why Lily dated a man who had aspirations to be a Broadway and film star, can she actually argue that she deserved to remain anonymous? It's worth noting that Lilly and Ethan were high school sweethearts, so no one could say that she 'knew' as a teenager what she was signing up for when she attached herself to someone pursuing fame.

Her pursuit of privacy is something that often conflicted with the public persona of her ex-husband.

"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.

"My partner was on a different path, in which social media and exposure were not impediments but rather necessities… It was a tenuous balance — my profession, which requires privacy, and his, which is measured in applause — but it worked well while life was unfolding according to our plans."

Since her private life has become public, Jay has had to navigate with her patients a different dynamic.

"My patients have 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? Or did they know about my divorce and didn't know it was okay to tell me?"

But she has admitted that the controversy negatively impacted her career prospects, even in subtle ways.

Lily Jay and Ethan Slater at the opening night of Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical. Image: Getty.

"It's hard to measure an absence, and I can't say for sure how much my career has been impacted by what's out there online. But there have been hints along the way, like the job offer that dissolved without explanation after yet another tabloid news cycle," she said.

"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. I have the deeply human propensity to find evidence for my worries in the unknown.

"As a visitor in this digital land I thought had successfully chosen not to live in, it is uncanny to see myself in a shoddy mosaic of others' words and impressions."

Lilly ended the essay with a message to her patients, and it's rather profound.

"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," she continued.

"Consider this essay my message in a bottle sent out to sea to maybe wash up at my patients' feet someday: I'm sorry I can't be invisible anymore (really, more than you know, I'm sorry)," she penned.

"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."

I'm just letting that sit for a moment.

If Lilly Jay didn't have a schedule full of bookings before, this stunningly poignant essay will have patients lining up around the block.

Feature image: Getty.