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Actress Samira Wiley engaged

Written by . Published: October 04 2016

Actress Samira Wiley is engaged to writer Lauren Morelli.

The Orange is the New Black star and Lauren, who is part of the show's creative team, have been dating since 2014 and on Tuesday (04Oct16) Samira announced the couple is set to wed.



Showing off a picture of her engagement ring on Instagram, Samira captioned the photograph, "yes."


Lauren was previously married to Steve Basilone, but the couple divorced in 2014 after two years of marriage, after she went public with the fact she was gay and had fallen for Samira.


"I realized I was gay in fall 2012, one of my first days on the set (of Orange is the New Black)," she wrote in an essay for Identities.Mic in May, 2014. "While Writing for Orange Is the New Black, I Realized I Am Gay. Five months after my wedding, I flew to New York to start production on my first episode of Orange, and from that moment on my life fell into a parallel rhythm with (lead character) Piper's story in a way that went from interesting to terrifying in a matter of months."


She went on to reveal it took an intimate scene between lesbian characters Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) and Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) for Morelli to really come to terms with her sexuality.


She added, "I was nervous about the first love scene I'd written for Alex and Piper. I 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."

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