Who are the fathers of Stacey's children in EastEnders? The list runs to three
Stacey Slater has never done family the easy way, and her children are proof.
Across her years in EastEnders she's had three kids — and, as the headline promises, three different fathers. One mother, three dads. Here's who fathered each, plus the who's-the-daddy chaos that came with all three.
The three fathers, one by one
- Lily Slater — Ryan Malloy — Lily, born 23 June 2010, is Stacey's daughter with Ryan Malloy (Neil McDermott), conceived during a 2009 affair. For years she was thought to belong to someone else entirely.
- Arthur Fowler — Kush Kazemi — Born on Christmas Eve 2015, Arthur is Stacey's son with Kush Kazemi (Davood Ghadami) — even though half of Walford, husband Martin included, assumed the baby was Martin's.
- Hope Fowler — Martin Fowler — Born prematurely on 13 October 2017, Hope is the only one of the three actually fathered by Martin Fowler (James Bye), Stacey's on-off husband.
Lily's dad: the long version
At birth Lily was Lily Branning, and everyone took it as read that Bradley Branning (Charlie Clements), Stacey's husband, was the father. Then came a far darker thread: Stacey had been raped by Archie Mitchell and feared the baby was his. Only after Bradley's death did Ronnie Mitchell reveal that Archie had been left sterile by cancer treatment — which pointed straight to Ryan. To this day, Lily calls her adoptive dad Martin her father.
Arthur's who's-the-daddy twist
Arthur arrived in the middle of Stacey's postpartum psychosis storyline, with Martin and Kush both in the frame. Martin believed the baby was his until January 2016, when a nurse handed him a letter Stacey had written during her recovery — spelling out that Arthur was Kush's. They reconciled and married anyway.
The dad who raised all three
Here's the part that sums Stacey up: Martin Fowler fathered just one of her three children, yet he raised all of them, adopting both Lily and Arthur as his own.
The grim footnote is that most of the men in this story are now gone. Kush Kazemi was murdered by serial killer Gray Atkins, shoved under a Tube train on 19 April 2021. Bradley Branning — the man long assumed to be Lily's dad — fell to his death from the Queen Vic roof in the show's live 25th-anniversary episode in 2010. And Martin himself was killed off in EastEnders' 40th-anniversary live episode in February 2025. Of the three biological fathers, only Ryan Malloy is still alive.
For the record: Lily went on to make Stacey a grandmother at just 12, in a 2023 storyline, with Ricky Branning as the father. The Slater knack for a tangled family tree clearly runs in the blood.