WNBA megastar and Olympian Brittney Griner writes that she felt she used to be being used as a “pawn” by Russian President Vladimir Putin when she used to be arrested and imprisoned simply weeks prior to he invaded Ukraine in 2022.
The Phoenix Mercury megastar’s memoir “Coming Home,” which debuted Tuesday at No. 1 on Amazon’s best-sellers checklist, lays out in element the occasions main as much as her arrest, the demanding situations of her just about 10-month detainment in a few of Russia’s maximum infamous penal colonies, the agony of ready to be launched — and so a lot more, all in 300 pages. In one phase, she describes the enjoy of being a Black homosexual girl in a Russian jail beneath Putin.
“Black lives matter,” Griner wrote. “We hear that in the streets, but what is a Black life really worth? Judging by our history, it seems not much, and even less if you’re gay. For Putin, my worth was as a pawn. My arrest gave him leverage in his clash with the West. He was well aware of America’s long history of racial tensions, and he knew how to use that to his benefit.”
In February 2022, Griner traveled to Russia to play her 8th season in the rustic’s girls’s basketball league. She used to be arrested after two vials of hashish oil, totaling not up to a gram, had been discovered in her baggage on the airport in Moscow. She pleaded accountable to drug fees and used to be sentenced to 9 years in jail.
Griner wrote that she used to be distressed about having disillusioned her intently knit circle of relatives and Black folks in basic.
When the news of her arrest broke, Griner wrote: “I cried because I’d let down my father. The Griner name was now stained around the globe: dopehead, drug dealer, dumb. I hurt because I knew I’d handed the world a weapon. When you’re Black, your behavior is never just about you. It’s about your entire community.”
Though she mentioned she wears her Blackness with delight, Griner mentioned she felt as even though her movements “shamed my people.”
“Blackness doesn’t make you less, but it does frame your life,” she wrote. “When you walk into a room, so does race. Frankly, it shows up before you do. It colors every conversation, shapes how you’re viewed, determines whether you’re even heard. From the day you get here, Blackness hangs over everything, from comments about your hair (‘Can I touch it?’) to mentions that certain Black people are ‘smart’ (’cause it’s assumed we’re idiots). The message comes through loud and clear: You’re not one of us, you’re less.”
It used to be so dangerous that Griner mentioned she pondered suicide in the early days of incarceration. She wrote that she’d spend her nights “listing ways I could end my misery.” She concept best of it. And after many sleepless nights, she stopped worrying in regards to the freezing temperatures, that her lengthy legs dangled off the bed and that the mattress springs poked into her frame. “I was a legit zombie,” she mentioned.
By the time Griner used to be allowed to bathe there, she used to be stunned on the repulsive stipulations, however knew she needed to get in the water.
“In the WNBA, my teammates and I joked about the prison showers — a big space with spouts spread around. This was the real thing,” she wrote. “It was nasty, exposed pipes on every wall. Long hair strands all over the tile floor and gathered in the drains. A bloody tampon was tucked between two pipes. As much as I was disgusted by the scene, I was just as repulsed by my stench.”
Correctional Colony No. 1, sometimes called IK-1, is a former orphanage transformed into a jail about 50 miles from Moscow, which might take about two hours to power in Russia’s infamous site visitors. Griner had spent the time being transported there handcuffed, along with her 6-foot-9 body folded in the again of a car now not supplied for somebody her peak. She used to be additionally deeply afraid, now not figuring out what to anticipate, however figuring out that the place she used to be headed used to be no position somebody would wish to be.
When there, she won myriad directions prior to making it to the bathe.
“I undressed and found the cleanest part of the floor,” she wrote. “I turned the faucet on, and rusty brown water came spouting out.”
Once she were given over the colour, “hot water felt so good on my skin. I closed my eyes tight, trying to forget where I was. I thought of Relle [her wife] and home and all I had left behind. Down the water slid from my dreads onto the floor splashing away the hell I endured. I stayed in there a good 30 minutes until I banged on the door for the guard to let me out. That was the nastiest shower I’d ever taken. It was also the best.”
She wrote about her larger worry when transferred to an much more infamous exertions camp, Correctional Colony No. 2 or IK-2, 300 miles east of Moscow. It used to be recognized for “horrid conditions, hard labor and inmate torture,” Griner wrote. And temperatures that dipped to five underneath 0.
“When I entered IK-2, I flipped a switch in my head. I was an inmate now, I told myself.”
She labored all day, making army uniforms, shoveling snow, breaking apart ice.
At IK-2, “I had been frozen, sick, got my hair chopped off. The girl I was lay on a heap of dreads on a concrete floor. … At a labor camp in Russia in the dead of winter, I learned how tough I was.”
Tough, however battered. The enjoy left her with bouts of “depression, with long stretches of silence and heartache.” One factor that helped her push during the despair and realities of incarceration, she mentioned, had been the uplifting letters from friends and family, in addition to the mail she won from strangers. Now that she’s returned to the U.S., she’s again to enjoying for the Mercury. She’s additionally seeing a therapist.
The Biden management negotiated a business for her free up in December 2022: Griner could be launched in trade for Russian palms broker Viktor Bout, referred to as the “Merchant of Death.” Before freedom, she skilled one ultimate humiliation: Russian guards ordering her to strip bare as they took footage.
“I didn’t cover my privates, nor did I cower or tremble,” she wrote. “I sense they expected me to fall apart. … I stood tall. . . I felt like weeping, but I had no tears left.”
She wrote that she helps to keep one closing vow: “I will not rest until Paul Whelan is released,” she mentioned of the previous Marine who has been detained in Russia since 2018 on accusations of spying. The U.S. denies the fees.
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