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Lauren Morelli was married to Steve Basilone for only a few months before she discovered that she was gay while writing for Orange Is The New Black. In an essay for Identities.Mic, Morelli describes her life falling, "into a parallel rhythm with Piper's story in a way that went from interesting to terrifying in a matter of months." She also expresses the anxiety leading up to filming Alex and Piper's first love scene, as an indicator of her sexuality:
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. I was sure it was bleeding into my writing. How could it not? I was married to a man, but I wasn't straight.Morelli and her now ex-husband have jointly filed for divorce, and she is happily dating Samira Wiley who plays Poussey in the Netflix series.