Brittney Griner was the focus of a major United States international relations story for most of 2022.
The WNBA star spent 10 months in a Russian prison after she was caught at an airport with vape cartridges that contained cannabis oil, which is illegal in Russia.
Griner was detained on February 17, 2022 in Moscow to play for a club team there as it is common for many WNBA players to play professional basketball overseas during the offseason in order to supplement their relatively low contracts in the WNBA.
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The Phoenix Mercury center was released by Russia on December 8, 2023 in a prisoner exchange that saw the U.S. release Russian arms deal Viktor Bout in return. The diplomatic dustup happened amid the still ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia.
Griner returned to action in the WNBA in the 2023 season, playing in 31 of 40 games and finishing with averages of 17.5 points, 6.3 rebounds and 1.6 blocks while also being named to her eighth All-Star game.
She’s remained relatively silent about the Russia incident since returning, though she has still faced adversity back home, including a public incident of harassment at a Dallas airport.
However, on Wednesday, May 1, Griner sat down with Good Morning America and gave an emotional interview to Rachel Roberts, admitting that she pins all the blame on herself for the incident.
“At the end of the day it’s my fault, and I let everybody down,” Griner said as tears began to flow.
She admitted that she still hasn’t fully gotten over the guilt from what happened.
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Griner also described the difficult conditions of her time detained in a Russian prison in the interview, made even more difficult by the fact that she is 6 feet 9 inches tall.
“The mattress had a huge blood stain on it and they give you these thin two sheets, so you’re basically laying on bars,” Griner said. “From the middle of my shins to my feet, stuck through the bars, which in prison, you don’t really want to stick your leg and arm through bars because someone could go up and grab it, break it, twist it.”
She also described having just one roll of toilet paper for months at a time and toothpaste that was expired for 15 years that she says she only used to kill the mold on the walls.
Griner was sentenced to nine years in prison on Aug. 4, and months later, was transferred to another penal colony hundreds of miles from Moscow called IK-2. GMA described it as “one of the worst prisons in Russia.”
When asked about the critics who question how she could have left these cartridges in her luggage, Griner said it was simply just a huge mental error.
“I would say: Have you ever forgot your keys in your car, left your car running? Have you ever [asked] ‘Where’s my glasses? They’re on top of my head. Where’s my phone? Oh, it’s in my pocket. It’s just so easy to have a mental lapse, you know? Granted my mental lapse was on a more grand scale, but it doesn’t take away from how that can happen,” Griner said.
Griner has been back in the US for over a year now and is slated to play next season after signing another one-year deal with the Mercury.
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