Brittney Griner book: The shocking truth of her time in Russian prison.
SlateI would watch a show where Tucker Carlson interviews Brittney Griner. At one point in Coming Home, Griner’s new memoir of her forced stay in Russia for most of 2022, the nine-time WNBA All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist quotes Nelson Mandela’s words: “No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” By that measure, Griner knows Russia as well as almost any American. Mandela’s remark appears as the epigraph for a chapter titled “Slave Camp,” which aptly describes the prison where Griner spent most of her 293 days in Russian lockups for the crime of accidentally bringing into the country two vape pens containing a total of 0.7 grams of medically prescribed cannabis—which prosecutors characterized as a “significant amount of narcotics.” She later learned that, in half of Russia’s 36 trials that year for the same crime, the defendants received suspended sentences. By the time her trial came up, she “wasn’t just another prisoner,” as she puts it, but a “chess piece in a showdown between superpowers.” Where usually some deal is worked out with a local official, Griner’s case “was already at the Kremlin.” The Biden administration formally declared her case one of “wrongful detention,” meaning it was put in the hands of a State Department office authorized to bargain with foreign governments for an American citizen’s release. During the 2023 season, after she got back, she writes, “I stood for the national anthem, teared up at its new meaning for me.” She explains, “I stood proudly for the reason I once knelt, because I cherish my homeland.” One’s attitude toward the object of protest changes “after being imprisoned in a country where public dissent can get you killed.” Not that coming home was all peaches and cream.
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