A Boston-born Smith College grad, Piper Chapman got involved in a relationship with an international drug smuggler, Catherine Cleary Wolters.

[3] After breaking up with Wolters, Kerman met Larry Smith and got engaged before being charged with felonious money laundering in 1998 and striking a deal.

[1] Chapman's fiancé, Larry Bloom, is based on Smith, Kerman's real life boyfriend and eventual husband.

Chapman is a 31-year-old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant who is sentenced to 15 months in prison for carrying a bag of drug-money ($50,000) to Belgium for her girlfriend, Alex Vause.

Piper is one of very few emphatically atheist inmates on a television show that highlights the theme of issues around American religious freedom.

Meanwhile, Bloom, an aspiring writer, publishes a story about Chapman's incarceration that paints unflattering portraits of her fellow inmates and the prison staff.

Chapman is elected to the prison council but finds that the only change she is able to make is to get the track reopened for Janae Watson (Vicky Jeudy), who was put in solitary confinement during the screwdriver incident.

[12][13] After spending a month in solitary confinement, Chapman is flown to Chicago to serve as a witness against the drug kingpin who had been Vause's boss.

[14] There, she spends time in a maximum security prison with dangerous inmates who menace her Chapman begins a business selling used panties to people outside of Litchfield, enlisting her brother Cal as her middleman.

[17] In reviewing season 1, Matthew Wolfson Slant Magazine describes Chapman as "a familiar vessel through which to comprehend prison's unfamiliar terrain".

[20] Tom Meltzer of The Guardian wrote "Chapman's romantic and rebellious re-awakening drives the show, but it is the ensemble that kept us coming back for more".

[24] As he reviewed season 2, The Huffington Post Canada entertainment editor Chris Jancelewicz, opined that "Schilling's deadpan expressions and snap comedic timing help us empathize and grow to love her" as her character became more understandable.

[25] Alicia Lutes of MTV wrote that as of Season 2 the show is about Piper understanding herself and her capabilities better "even if those abilities put her further in the muck" and not about her possible reformation.

[26] Sarene Leeds of The Wall Street Journal stated that in Season 3 Piper changed from being "a gangsta wannabe into a dangerous villain that is not to be crossed" after planting contraband in girlfriend Stella's bed to get her sent to the maximum security unit in retaliation for Stella stealing from her; Leeds argued that the change "is a necessary plot device to keep things interesting" even though she did not like the new version of Piper.

[27] Drew Millard of Vice wrote that Season 3 Piper went "completely off the deep end" and changed "into the most unlikable version of herself", making her "deadweight on a show that was at first strictly about her.