Less than two years ago, WNBA star Brittney Griner was beginning her nine-year sentence in a penal colony in Russia, sewing uniforms for the Russian army and subsisting on spoiled food. She lived to glimpse the sky. She has never been further from the sport that made her a household name. The smoking habit she had acquired in prison had decreased her lung capacity. She rarely heard from her wife, Cherelle, or from her family and friends, and she had no idea when she would return home, or if she would.
Griner was arrested at Moscow airport in February 2022, when officials found two vaporizer cartridges in her backpack with 0.7 grams of cannabis oil. (To treat Griner’s chronic pain, a doctor in Arizona had prescribed medical marijuana, but it was illegal in Russia.) She was charged with illegal drug possession and smuggling “a significant amount” of narcotics into the country and was sent to prison. .
That December, after 10 months of detention in Russia, she was finally released. She went back to playing, thinking that the routine and familiarity of it would punish her. But the transition was difficult and she is only now back in shape. On May 7 she will publish a memoir, “Coming Home,” detailing her ordeal.
Here are the highlights from my profile of the basketball star after I met her at a practice facility in Phoenix.
She endured dehumanizing treatment
In the cell where she was first held, a hole in the floor stained with feces served as a toilet. The prison guards brought him milk porridge with a piece of blue fish that made him nauseous. She had no way to clean herself: no towels, soap, toothpaste, shampoo or deodorant. She tore T-shirts into several pieces: for teeth, for body, for toilet paper.
“I’ve never been so dirty in my life,” she said. Her degradation would push her to contemplate suicide.
Griner, an openly gay professional athlete, stands nearly seven feet tall. The prison guards looked at his body and questioned his gender. The treatment triggered memories of childhood bullying for him. Every time she was taken to a doctor or a court date, she was forced to sit in a cage that was too small for her height. Once, a guard locked Griner’s wrists and then chained the lock to the guard’s wrist. Griner felt like a dog on a leash. The doctors forced her to undress and photograph her naked.
Griner started smoking, up to a pack a day. He transformed himself physically, losing muscle mass and gaining weight thanks to the store’s products, such as packaged noodles, muffins, salami and condensed milk. She felt depressed and even felt that doing sit-ups in her cell was beyond her ability.
Cutting the locomotives was a rare moment of agency
After her initial arrest, Griner was transferred to a women’s detention center about two hours from Moscow.
When Griner’s footage was first broadcast around the world, his long locomotives were cropped and seemed an indication of the cruelty he was enduring. But Griner told me that cutting his hair was actually a rare moment of agency during his incarceration. The prison was barely heated and his locomotives were never completely dry. He was worried about getting pneumonia, so he decided to cut them off. “The cut was horrible, but not as bad as it could have been,” he told me, laughing.
Griner He appealed personally to Biden
Griner wrote a letter to President Biden that was sent on July 4, pleading with him not to forget her. “Please do everything you can to bring us home,” he said. “I still have many good things to do with my freedom that you can help restore.” Dennis Rodman (in public) and Donald Trump (in private) He said they would fly to Russia to look for her. (She didn’t either.)
Griner’s most devoted and persistent defenders were black women, many of whom argued online that her government’s response seemed muted. Thousands of people sent messages to Griner in prison.
A guard gave him a note telling him he was going home.
In late November, about a month after she was transferred to a penal colony 200 miles from Moscow, Griner received a call from the U.S. Embassy. They said talks were underway for a prisoner exchange. She was excited but cautious. On December 2, she was put in a cage. and transported to a men’s prison, where she feared she would have to serve the rest of her sentence.
That night, a guard passed him a note telling him he was going home. The next morning, he got on a plane without knowing where he was going. The plane landed in Abu Dhabi. She was greeted by Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs at the State Department. At that moment, Griner knew she was really going home.
She suffered from PTSD after her return
In prison, Griner had a singular focus: freedom. At home he felt adrift. Determined to return to basketball, she underwent a rigorous 100-day training regimen and rejoined her WNBA team, the Phoenix Mercury. But her 2023 season was uneven and she experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her therapy has taught her that there is no “before” anymore.
While preparing for the next During the season, he likes to head into the mountains near his home in Phoenix. “That’s very important to me: getting away from screens and cameras.”