Lauren Morelli Responds To Samira Wiley Engagement After Instagram Picture

“Orange is the New Black” writer Lauren Morelli expressed her gratitude for the love she received after her engagement to actress Samira Wiley, who portrayed Litchfield inmate Poussey Washington on the Netflix series. She took to social media, the same platform she used to announce her happy news, to share her thanks on the same day she proposed.

“You guys! Thank you for all of the lovely messages and hysterical crying gifs,” Morelli wrote to her 31,800 followers Tuesday. “We love you too!” The post was liked more than 1,000 times and shared dozens of times. She made sure to add a crying gif to her post, too.

Wiley hasn’t taken to social media since the announcement. The last thing that appears on her Twitter account is her engagement picture. “I'll do anything with this one...” she captioned the image. Wiley added an emoji of an engagement ring.

The couple’s relationship has been public since 2014. At the time, Morelli announced she would be divorcing her then-husband, television writer Steve Basilone. She didn’t realize she was gay until she started to compose scenes for “OITNB.” It made her feel like a fraud to write about the relationship between the show’s main characters, Piper Chapman and Alex Vause.

“I was nervous about the first love scene I’d written for Alex and Piper. 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,” she wrote a coming out essay for Identities.Mic in May 2014. “I was sure it was bleeding into my writing. How could it not? I was married to a man, but I wasn’t straight.”

Months later, they “very amicably” divorced in September 2014 after Morelli and Basilone filed a joint petition, TMZ wrote at the time.

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