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”

1 / 2 Chevron Chevron Cleary Wolters, outside her mother’s home in Ohio.

Catherine 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.”