July 22, 2025
Brittney Griner shares graphic particulars about her 10-month detainment in Russian jail.
Brittney Griner opened up about her harrowing yr in a Russian penal colony, the place she says she was stripped, starved, and made to really feel lower than human.
The nine-time WNBA all-star sat down with Cam Newton and shared graphic particulars of her 10-month detainment and imprisonment in Russia after being discovered with THC vape cartridges in her baggage. Griner described enduring invasive physique searches, drug and COVID assessments, and a respiratory examination earlier than being thrown into solitary confinement with barely any clothes.
“No bathe, no bathroom paper, no toothbrush…the bathroom was only a gap, lined in feces and urine,” she recalled.
It was an expertise that made her really feel “worse than a d*** stray canine,” she added. “A minimum of a stray canine get some meals each on occasion. Like get one thing. I didn’t really feel like a human.”
Griner mentioned she was pressured to make use of a T-shirt as a makeshift washcloth and credited her household for preserving her alive throughout her darkest moments, believing that if she ended her life in jail, her family members would possibly by no means get her physique again.
“Making an attempt to be robust, I received just a little Sudoku e book that I had with me after they took me,” she mentioned. “So I’m writing in it, like I knew what day it was. So I might write the date and I might write just a little one thing like how I’m feeling.”
The six-time All-WNBA member received candid when recalling Russian authorities’ “final play to terrorize me” through the prisoner swap that led to her launch in December 2022. She was transferred from a penal colony to a males’s jail, the place she was stripped of her humanity all through the switch.
“As a result of they have been checking me in, that they had me stripped down, butt bare, in entrance of a room like in all probability seven to eight males, they usually had the Polaroid and had me spinning in a circle, whereas they have been taking the pictures proper, of my tattoos as a result of my tattoos are no matter they’re,” Griner recalled.
Although her imprisonment dominated nationwide headlines, Griner believes the media protection would’ve been dealt with very in a different way if the detainee had been a high-profile male athlete like LeBron James.
“I feel the media and the general public response would have been totally different; they wouldn’t have mechanically roped me off as a drug addict, a druggie, delinquent,” she added. “I feel it could have been a distinct standpoint.”
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