Brittney Griner has been for nine months in prison at Russia. Arrested in February 2022 on drug trafficking charges because she was found in possession of several bottles of cannabis oil.
Hers was in fact a politically motivated detention, a lever by the Russian government to put pressure on the U.S. government. Griner was freed in December 2022 in a prisoner exchange with an arms dealer who was being held in the United States.
The player is back on the court with the Phoenix Mercury, will start another WNBA season in a few days, and will have a book out, Coming Home, in which he recounts his experience. He anticipated a few passages of it, recounting chilling details about this terrible experience.
In the first weeks I thought for real about suicide but I desisted because I knew they would not return the body to my family. After the first few days in prison in Moscow I was transferred, an 8-9 hour trip locked in a kind of cage. There were 20 of us in the cell, we had only one bathroom for 50 people, we spent our days sewing uniforms for Russian soldiers. My mattress had a big blood stain on it, the sheets are very thin so you actually sleep on the net. The bed was short so your legs would go into bars but I always avoided getting stuck because at night someone would climb up and break your ankles. I had one roll of toilet paper a month and a tube of toothpaste that was 10 years out of date, I used it to get some mold off the walls. It was full of spiders nesting in my hair, so I had to cut them off. In there you have to do what they tell you to avoid worse consequences. They demanded that I sign a letter apologizing and thanking their “great leader,” it was written in Cyrillic and I didn’t want to sign it but I wanted to go home at all costs, so I bowed out.
Photo: FIBA
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