Griner has cannabis oil in his luggage and is sentenced to nine years in a labor camp in Russia. The 33-year-old American writes that she still feels guilty a year and a half after her release.
Brittney Griner’s nightmare began in a country she thought she knew. On a journey she wished she had never taken. It’s February 17, 2022. Griner, one of the best basketball players in the world, is flying from Arizona to Russia. The American plays there for the Yekaterinburg club, where she will join after the end of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) season. In Russia she earns millions, stays in the best hotels, and enjoys a life as a superstar.
Griner changes trains in Moscow. Normally the control area for connecting flights is empty, but on this day it is swarming with customs officials. They wear uniforms, some even blue military fatigues. Griner thinks, “What the hell is going on here?”
A customs officer asks her to open her backpack. As she opens the last zipper, Griner feels two vape cartridges. It contains 0.7 grams of cannabis oil. Griner is a licensed cannabis user in the USA and uses the oil for pain. Cannabis is strictly prohibited in Russia.
Griner claims she packed the cartridges by mistake, but Russian officials don’t believe her. Griner realizes: She’s made a terrible mistake.
“I had given the world a weapon”
Griner is arrested, and in August 2022 a Russian court sentences her to nine years in a prison camp for illegal drug possession and attempted smuggling.
The case becomes highly political: American President Joe Biden gets involved, the USA and Russia agree on a prisoner exchange. She will be released in December 2022 – in exchange for the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
Griner initially remained silent about her experiences in Russian custody. This week she published her memories of it in the book “Coming Home”. In 320 pages she reports on the 293 days she spent in captivity. “Coming Home” provides insights into Griner’s inner struggles as a 6-foot-6 African-American woman, her lesbian marriage, and her newfound faith in God. First and foremost, however, the book shows what it means to be taken prisoner by Russia. Griner repeatedly writes of a “personal hell.”
Their gross oversight turned them into a geopolitical football. Seven days after she was detained, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched war in Ukraine. The timing of her arrest couldn’t have been worse, writes Griner: “It hurt me because I knew that I had given a weapon to the world.”
Griner spent the first few months in a women’s prison two hours from Moscow. She suffered from panic attacks, couldn’t sleep, and started smoking. Diseases such as HIV, chlamydia and herpes circulated in the prison. Griner’s Russian cellmate, Alena, made the time in the women’s prison a little more bearable. She translated the prison staff’s orders and became a friend.
In prison, Griner was harassed because of her homosexuality and her androgynous appearance. The guards made lewd jokes and asked about their genitals. She was subjected to a psychiatric evaluation; Griner feared that she would be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. A prison employee asked her about “sick thoughts.” Another guard ripped the towel from her chest and asked if Griner was born male.
Controversial prisoner exchange
After the verdict was announced in August 2022, Griner was taken to the IK-2 penal camp in Mordovia, a converted gulag. The communists once created a Soviet penal system for twenty million people with the labor camps. The gulags have officially been abolished in Russia, but Putin still allows his opponents to disappear into these isolated prison camps.
Griner reports precarious conditions; some inmates had to toil for fifteen hours a day. She herself worked in the sewing shop, a factory-like building lined with Soviet-era sewing machines. Your task: to cut the threads for the buttons; She was too big to work on the sewing machines. The room was unheated, bathroom breaks were forbidden, and anyone who made mistakes while sewing was scolded by the supervisors. A group of seamstresses had to make 500 military uniforms every day.
At the end of November 2022, Griner received a call from the American embassy. She learned that discussions were underway about a prisoner exchange. Suddenly everything happened quickly. On December 2nd, she was loaded into a van with four men guarding her. They drove through the darkness for eight hours, then the van stopped. Griner was unloaded at a men’s prison and locked in a cell. A guard passed her a note: “You’re leaving tonight.”
The next morning, Griner was taken to an examination room. She had to take off her clothes. The guards began photographing them from every angle. Griner was then driven to a plane without knowing where she was being taken.
The plane landed in Abu Dhabi. Roger Carstens, Biden’s special envoy for hostage affairs, welcomed them. He gave her a pin that read “We are BG” – we are Brittney Griner. Griner’s wife Cherelle and her assistant Lindsay created this slogan, it went viral and even reached President Biden.
Viktor Bout, a Russian criminal who had sold Soviet-era weapons to civil war countries, got out of another plane; American soldiers are also said to have died as a result of weapons he sold. Griner and Bout shook hands. Then Griner boarded the plane that Bout had just left and flew off to the USA.
Bout was one of the most wanted men in the world until he was arrested in the United States in 2008. The fact that he was released caused outrage in the USA. Griner was criticized on social media and portrayed as unpatriotic, with some saying she would have been better off staying in Russia.
In the eyes of many Americans, Griner was complicit in her arrest. And: She is a lesbian African American and belongs to a minority. Griner writes that not all hostages are the same. While some would gain the public’s sympathy, others would be despised. She says: “For some, I am guilty simply because of my blackness.”
In an interview with the American television station ABC News, Griner says that she still hasn’t come to terms with the harassment in the prison camp. The worst thing is the feeling of guilt, she says, her eyes fill with tears, her voice breaks: “I disappointed everyone, my family, my team, my fans. I still can’t cope with this.” Griner’s path to freedom is still long.
Brittney Griner, Michelle Burford: Coming Home. Alfred-A.-Knopf-Verlag, New York 2024. 320 S., Fr. 39.90.