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I shoulda done that 
Quote:
The Real Alex of Orange Is the New Black Speaks for the First Time: “I Was Not Piper’s First, and I Certainly Did Not Seduce Her”
atherine Cleary Wolters can speak to many of the actual events behind the hit Netflix series Orange Is the New Black with a hard-won authority, but there is one detail that seems particularly crucial.
“We did not have sex in prison,” the 51-year-old ex-felon says of her relationship with Piper Kerman, on whose book the show is based. “Not even a little bit.”
Wolters is the real-life inspiration for the character Alex Vause on the soon-to-return women’s prison series, a fictionalized version of the liberal arts-to-lockdown memoir of the same name by Kerman, Wolters’s ex . . . ex-something or other (but more on that in a bit). Orange Is the New Black was a near-instant smash when it debuted last summer, and eventually became Netflix’s most popular original program. Though much of the show’s appeal lies in its brilliant ensemble cast, helmed by celebrated show-runner Jenji Kohan of Weeds fame, the relationship between Vause (called Nora in the book) and Piper Chapman provides a lot of its addictive propulsion. On the show, Vause and Kerman’s alter-ego, Chapman, are surprised to be re-united in prison years after the globe-spanning, drug- and money-trafficking romance that landed them both behind bars. The sultry, smoky-voiced Laura Prepon of That ‘70s Show fame plays Vause, while Taylor Schilling, that gorgeous blond actress with the hypnotic Crest teeth, plays Chapman as they act out a season-long dance of on-again, off-again attraction.
Yet, according to Wolters, she and Kerman were only ever in the same prison facility for just five weeks—mostly during a brief stretch in a Chicago detention center in 2005. They were both in town to testify against a co-conspirator in their case, and their environs and mental conditions were not well suited to rekindling lost love. Shackled together on the Con Air flight there, Wolters says Kerman refused to even speak to her.
“We were ghosts of the humans we had once been, milling about amongst hundreds of other human ghosts, shackled and chained, prodded through transport centers at gunpoint, moved through holding facilities,” says Wolters from her mother’s house in Ohio. These days, Wolters is just shy of a PhD in information technology, assurance, and security, and exhibits a flair for the philosophical.
“Praying is about the most intimate thing two people can do in some places, not sex,” Wolters says. “We made some mean dinners together, though, out of cans of cheese, corn chips, and chili, and Piper learned how to communicate effectively through a toilet—a little something you’ll never pick up at Smith.”
In other words, as Wolters is clear on: the two women most certainly did not consummate a will-they-or-won’t-they narrative arc in a burst of prison-chapel passion, as the show has it. On the whole, Wolters says that the true story would be “so wretched and stinky, it would quite possibly result in a collapsed universe. So I guess it’s a good thing Piper and Jenji stick with the fun little tidbits.”
The tale of the real-life Kerman and Wolters begins in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1991. The pair became friends around the time the Boston-raised Kerman graduated from Smith College, but stuck around town. Both women ran in what Wolters calls “the same little Noho lesbian social circle.”
“I was not Piper’s first, and I certainly did not seduce her,” Wolters says, contrary to the show’s first episode meet-cute, which gives way to the fictional Piper’s dalliance as a cash mule.
Wolters and Kerman drank and went clubbing together. Kerman took care of Wolters’s cats when she traveled and shared in her tales of adventure, or served as a shoulder to cry on, when she returned. In her version, she and Kerman did not become romantically involved until after they had trafficked either heroin or money, for a network run by the alleged Nigerian drug kingpin Buruji Kashamu.
“When we were traveling together I started developing a crush on her. And eventually that turned into a crazy mad love affair,” Wolters says. “But that was after she had already done the deed that made her complicit.”
“We weren't girlfriends,” Wolters adds for good measure. “We were friends with benefits . . . I was not the older sexy, glamorous lesbian who snatched her from her pristine Smith College cradle.”
Eventually, Kerman parted with Wolters, met a man named Larry, and got engaged. When the feds came knocking years later with charges related to her past cash smuggling, Kerman struck a plea. She spent 13 months in a Danbury, Connecticut, minimum-security prison beginning in 2004, an experience that formed the basis for Orange Is the New Black. Wolters, meanwhile, was charged with conspiracy to import heroin and served almost six years in a Dublin, California, prison before being paroled in 2008. She is working on a memoir of her own, titled Out of Orange. Wolters has also written three novels.
Laura Prepon (left) as Alex Vause, and Taylor Schilling as Piper Chapman, on Orange is the New Black.
Courtesy of Netflix.
One of the first season’s major plot points concerns whether or not Vause snitched on Chapman. The state of the pair’s romance often hinges on whether Chapman thinks Vause was the informant who “named” her. In reality, Wolters says, everyone involved in the case talked.
“They had picked the first round of us up two years prior to Piper’s somewhat congenial visit from the feds,” Wolters says of the ring’s undoing. “So, yes, I named her, she named me, and we all named each other. Fact was, we all thought we were doing the right thing, confessing, getting protection, and saving ourselves from certain death at the hands of a Nigerian drug lord who we knew would soon find we had all been arrested.”
All told, Wolters says she’s done almost 20 years either in prison or on parole for her involvement in the ring. In fact, she only finished her last stint of supervised release on April 10, 2014. Whereas Kerman has blanketed the news promoting first her book, published in 2010, and now the show, Wolters has been on the sideline. She’s watched on as events inspired by her own life have become the subject of marathon binge-watches the world over.
When I reach her by way of some Googling and a Chicago Tribune update on the case, she says that I’m the first reporter she’s spoken to. Today, Wolters is thrilled to be free and dreams of life away from the confines of Ohio, where she has been on supervised release for five years, staying with her mother. (That her mother is still alive at all is another departure from the show’s narrative.) Wolters is a software test engineer by profession, and wonders if she may soon be walking the beaches of Provincetown, Massachusetts, or riding her car down Lombard Street in San Francisco. Most importantly, somewhere out there, she’s hoping to find love again. Perhaps she’ll seek out one of the “two wives” she had in prison.
“They were sexy,” she says. “One looked just like Jennifer Lawrence.”
Though she and Kerman may not have hooked up in prison, Wolters was by no means celibate.
“Usually what you would do was have sex in your jail rooms,” she explains. “You’d have sex anywhere you could: the tennis court, the outdoor squash court, or the rake pile. Anyplace! When the guards aren’t around all bets are off. Everyone goes to it!”
“They romanticize sex on the TV show,” she adds.
When I ask if she’s a fan of the show at all, Wolters offers a truly conflicted response. She says she and Kerman eventually made peace during their Chicago layover, and she sounds genuinely proud of Kerman’s decision to put her own story out there. “That takes balls the size of Oklahoma,” she says. But it is strange for her to see her own life, as she puts it, interpreted and abstracted by actors.
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“This story isn’t about a fun ride through some old familiar haunt, giving me little glimpses and peeks of some fond old stomping ground,” she says. “Christ, it’s my nightmare, the one that wakes you gasping on your rubber legs that won’t run. . . . This stress is real, it is unrelenting. I've had a heart attack, a five-way bypass, been judged, humbled, and hobbled, but I made it.”
She pauses.
“But I watched, and of course I’ll watch the rest,” she says. “I can’t help it. It’s a great show. The actors are incredible, the story line is interesting, and come on, who doesn’t want to see Donna from That ’70s Show have lesbian sex?”
In response, Piper Kerman says the following:
“I’m glad Cleary is getting the chance to tell her story, because she is a charismatic and funny person. It should come as no surprise that we may have different points of view about the time we spent together. I think anyone would understand that my relationship with her was, and is, complicated. What I wrote about us in my book is true. If Cleary believes we were never girlfriends, that is startling news to me, though it’s certainly not the first time she has surprised me.
I was an out lesbian when I met Cleary, and dated many women before and after her (Larry Smith is the only guy I’ve ever considered a “boyfriend”). After my indictment for criminal conspiracy, I plead guilty to a lesser money-laundering charge and served 13 months of a 15-month sentence. Before pleading guilty, I received a copy of Cleary’s “proffer,” her official statement to the U.S. Attorney about her crimes—and in her proffer she implicated me for the crime I committed. When I plead guilty I was required to provide my own proffer—I could not possibly have described my crime without mentioning Cleary.
Although I did plead guilty and tried hard to take responsibility for my actions, there is no doubt that I held on to blame for Cleary. As I describe in my book, I did not speak to her on the flight from Oklahoma to Chicago, though we were seated together (not shackled together). We certainly did not have sex in prison, and that should be quite clear in my book. The relationship between the characters in the Netflix series, Piper Chapman and Alex Vause, is fictional. I did have the opportunity to make peace with Cleary in Chicago, to relinquish any sense of blame for her, and to work through my ideas and emotions about forgiveness and responsibility. Cleary did not force me to do anything, but rather made me seductive offers that I found very compelling back when I was 22 years old. I am exceptionally grateful that our odd chance meeting in Chicago happened, and I wish Cleary a very happy life moving forward.”
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