Emmy-winning actress Samira Wiley and Lauren Morelli are divorcing after nearly a decade of marriage.
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In a statement to Out, the actress and showrunner confirmed the divorce news. “After nine years together, we have decided to end our marriage,” the statement reads. “However, our lifelong commitment to co-parenting will forever remain.”
The estranged couple first met on the set of Orange is the New Black in late 2012. Wiley starred on the show as Poussey Washington while Morelli served as a writer and producer. Although Morelli was married at the time, she divorced her then-husband, Steve Basilone, in 2014.
Wiley and Morelli announced their engagement in 2016. They married in 2017 and welcomed their daughter in 2021.
The Actress and Writer Have Been Open About Their Personal Lives
Morelli previously revealed in an op-ed that she realized she was a lesbian shortly after she started working on Orange Is the New Black.
“I realized I was gay in fall 2012, one of my first days on the set,” she stated. “Accordingly, I was nervous about the first love scene I’d written for Alex [Laura Prepon] and Piper [Taylor Schilling].”
She then wrote, “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.”
Wiley shared in 2018 that she was first outed by an unnamed Orange Is the New Black co-star while they were discussing gay characters during an interview about the show. The actress admitted that she “cried a lot” about the situation and even tried to have the interview taken down.
“I think that if I wasn’t portraying these characters, I wonder how my own journey with my own sexual orientation,” she explained. “How I would embrace that, how I would walk the world if I wasn’t able to embrace the characters that I have been.”
After the co-star outed her, Wiey said she went on a “journey” to find herself. “I wasn’t always super open-hearted, but um, yeah. More specifically, that’s something that somebody took from me. You should be able to come out on your own terms, so that was probably a little deeper.”
The actress then added that, despite the situation, she is a “strong believer of whatever is supposed to happen will happen.”