Ethan Slater and His Ex-Wife Are Going Through a Messy, Public Breakup

Few actors have gotten more famous and more infamous simultaneously the way that Ethan Slater has. Ethan, who is probably best known for his relationship with Ariana Grande, first came to public attention after news broke that the two of them were dating and that Ethan had left his wife to pursue the relationship.

Ethan and Ariana met while the two of them were filming Wicked, and it seems like they are still together today. Now, Ethan's ex-wife has spoken out about the breakup and the way she treated him. Here's what we know about what went down between them.

While Ethan has not done much in the way of explaining why he left his wife, Lilly has now told her side of the story in a piece written for The Cut.

In the piece, Lilly explains that she has had to watch Ethan move on with Ariana while she raises their young daughter, who was only a couple of months old when Ethan left her. She also survived pre-eclampsia, and agreed to move to the U.K. with him so that he could be in Wicked.

"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," Lilly writes. "Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn't understand the growing distance between us."

Lilly also explained that she and Ethan were high school sweethearts who dated for several years before they got married in 2018. Their son was born in 2022, but in July of 2023, Ethan filed for divorce and went public about his relationship with Ariana.

It seems, based on Lilly's story at least, that the marriage was over long before the news of a divorce became public.

Lilly's piece does not explicitly say whether Ethan cheated. What seems clear, though, is that Ethan met Ariana on set and left his wife quickly thereafter. He might have cheated, or he may have ended their relationship quite abruptly to pursue another one.

"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 writes.

"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. 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."

While Lilly's essay about Ethan does not condemn him all that harshly, it nevertheless left many people feeling that she had been badly wronged. As a result, people came to her defense, suggesting that Ethan had behaved terribly in deciding to leave her at such a vulnerable moment. There were some harsh words for Ariana, too, but mostly, they were reserved for the actor who seems to have done quite a bit of damage.