Orange is the new bling! Samira Wiley of Orange Is the New Black is engaged to her longtime girlfriend, series writer Lauren Morelli.
Wiley, who plays Poussey on the popular Netflix series, shared the good news in two Tuesday, October 4, social media posts. On Twitter, she held her hand up and showed off her bejeweled ring as her love grinned excitedly behind her. “I’ll do anything with this one…,” the 29-year-old actress captioned the post. And on Instagram, she shared the same selfie with one word, three letters: “Yes.”
In May 2014, Morelli came out in an Identities.Mic essay titled “While Writing for ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ I Realized I Am Gay.” She also revealed that her sexuality is the reason why she divorced her then-husband, Steve Basilone, after two years in 2014.
“I was nervous about the first love scene I’d written for Alex and Piper,” Morelli wrote of stars Laura Prepon and Taylor Schilling’s characters. “I’d loved writing it, loved watching a tenderness emerge in their relationship where passion always seemed to be the ruling principle, but by that time, I was so deep in my own self-doubt that I constantly felt like a fraud. I was sure it was bleeding into my writing. How could it not? I was married to a man, but I wasn’t straight.”
Although her work on the Emmy-winning series helped her with this personal revelation, Morelli insists that there’s no overlap when it comes to her relationship, which became public in September 2014 after working together on set.
“I think we try to keep those two things separate as much as possible,” she told the Pittsburgh City Paper in March 2015. “The work is the work and our relationship — we’ve learned the value of privacy. We guard that pretty safely. On the other hand, the writers and cast and crew, we’re very much a family. Everyone there has been so supportive of us. It felt like a pretty seamless transition.”
