Editor’s note: On Aug. 1, the White House announced that Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, two Americans detained in Russia who are mentioned in this article, have been released as part of a multinational deal among seven countries that resulted in the release of 24 people.
Dozens of little girls in WNBA jerseys lined up to catch a glimpse of Brittney Griner. They screamed as Griner sprinted toward them with a giant smile, extending her hands to high-five as many as she could. The longtime Phoenix Mercury star even returned for one more round of high fives to make sure she didn’t miss a single, tiny hand.
Griner looked every bit in her element at her 10th All-Star Game on her home court in Phoenix earlier this month. Surrounded by her teammates and loved ones, and by the broader WNBA community that has so embraced her, she playfully hopped into the blue Kia idling near midcourt before the WNBA All-Star skills challenge, ready for a joyride. As the car slowly made its way down the court, snaking its way toward the arena tunnel, Griner stretched her 6-foot-9 body through the passenger window, dancing, laughing, smiling.
Being free.
Griner has had plenty of reason to feel buoyant. Over a week before the All-Star Game, she and her wife, Cherelle, welcomed their first child, Bash Raymond Griner. “My son is giving me a lot of joy,” Griner says now. And it seems like the other parts of her life are clicking into place, too—especially on the court.
She says she feels like herself again this season. Scoring with ease, posting up wherever she pleases, Griner is in top form for the Mercury. She looks confident; dominant, even. “What I want to do,” Griner says, “I can do it.” She had a few things she describes as “hiccups” at the start of the Mercury’s season, including a broken toe, but those are behind her. She says, “I feel like I have my athletic body back.”
She’s peaking at the right time, as she’s in Paris preparing to play in her third Olympics for Team USA, which tips off play against Japan on Monday. “I’m super excited,” says Griner, who helped Team USA win gold in 2016 (Rio de Janeiro) and 2021 (Tokyo). She tries to imagine what it would feel like if the U.S., which will be vying for its eighth straight Olympic gold medal, once again took home gold. “Just adding to the legacy,” she says. “When you’re sitting up on a podium, you just won gold, and flags are going up. It hits different. It hits way different.”
But the trip has an even deeper meaning. It’s Griner’s first foreign trip since the nightmare that tested her resolve: the one that took every ounce of strength she could muster to survive. She spent 293 days—nearly 10 months—incarcerated in several Russian prisons. Nearly two years after she was released, she is still processing her experiences. In May, she released her 2024 memoir, Coming Home, written with Michelle Burford. “For a long time,” Griner wrote, “I’ll be healing.”
Now, in trying to move forward with her life and her career, she says she has realized something profound—something that she hadn’t fully realized earlier in her career, before any of this happened.
“I didn’t know how resilient I was,” Griner says. “With life and basketball, I’ve realized I’m a little bit more resilient than I thought I was.”
Many in Griner’s inner circle say she is in a better space now than she has been at any point since returning from Russia. It’s a space that took many months to reach, but it’s also an ongoing journey. There is no “healed” destination, certainly no perfect day. “Every day I see her, she seems lighter. Or happier,” says Vince Kozar, the Mercury’s team president. “She was obviously carrying a weight last year—rightly so. And that weight isn’t just, ‘I want to play.’ It’s every single time you see someone for the first time, with no ill intentions of course, but they are pouring their emotions onto you.
“She was absorbing that from every friend, every family member, every fan at home and on the road, every family member of a wrongful detainee that [she] met,” Kozar says. “There is a lot for someone to take on while still trying to make your way back to yourself.”
In a sense, she may always be making her way back to herself. A self that is constantly shifting, adapting, processing, healing. It hasn’t been easy, especially when she was discussing the most painful parts of her incarceration, with the litany of interviews she did for her book.
One way she grounds herself is to get in her Jeep and drive miles away from her home in Phoenix to a secluded spot in the Sonoran Desert. Far from the honking cars and streetlights and city noise, it’s just her and the mountains. There’s a creek nearby, and she can’t hear much but the soothing trickle of water. “Just birds and water,” Griner says. “That is my sanctuary.”
With life and basketball, I’ve realized I’m a little bit more resilient than I thought I was.Brittney Griner
These are the moments when she is more at peace. In her breaks from basketball, she escapes to nature, whether it’s coming to her secret, secluded spot or going off-roading or camping. At times like these, she’s simply being present. Breathing. Inching toward some sliver of joy. “I just let my brain go blank,” Griner says. “Honestly not thinking about anything. … I don’t want to think when I’m out there. I just want to see what I see and admire it.”
She often notices the trees, and there are plenty in the desert: mesquite, paloverde, ironwood. Some have been there for over a hundred years. Some will be there after she’s gone. “The tree doesn’t worry about getting cut down,” Griner says. “It gets cut, it falls, it decays, it regrows. It just keeps going.”
She gazes at the various colors of the mountains and the unique contours of their profiles—red, brown, and majestic. Admiring their hues, she feels fully present. She thinks about the time she curled into the back of her Jeep and just stared at the endless, black night sky before falling asleep. “You don’t get to see the stars that well in the city at your house. There’s too much light,” she says. “But out there, it’s just pitch black.”
In these moments, she doesn’t have to remember—to relive—anything for anyone.
“When you’re out there, and you’re alone,” Griner says, “it’s just—I don’t have to be Brittney Griner. I don’t have to be the one that came back.”
She pauses. “I don’t have to be anything, honestly,” she says. “I could just exist.”
Journaling is part of her ongoing healing process. “It helps me just get it out of my head,” she says. “Then I can be like, ‘All right, it’s on paper. It’s out of my head now.’” But it isn’t always easy. To truly write—to own her story—is to confront the things that are especially difficult. “You got to be honest with yourself,” she says. “You can’t just sit there and write BS.”
She doesn’t want to speak publicly for this story about her experience in a Russian prison and what it took to get her home—not in this milestone moment, between the birth of her son and the start of the Olympics. “The best way to move forward is to actually do it,” she says.
As Griner looks ahead, those in her inner circle continue to tell the story of not just what she endured, but of how a community of people—from the White House and the State Department to her closest friends and family to the Women’s National Basketball Players Association and many in between—fought to bring her home. It is that quintessential sense of community, so in the marrow of what makes women’s basketball special, that has inspired Griner’s determination to further advocate for her fellow WNBA players as well as to fight for other Americans who are still detained abroad.
None of it has been easy. Or linear. Or neat. As she would eventually see, coming home was only the beginning of her healing process. Last season, her first back after her incarceration, she didn’t feel like herself on the court. As much as she struggled physically, she was coping with mental struggles, as she wrote in her memoir.
The first few weeks—and months—at home in Phoenix were difficult. As she detailed in her memoir, she dealt with anxiety, depression, sadness, and anger. She found it difficult to open up about her experiences at first. “I shut down,” she wrote. She was haunted by nightmares in which her prisoner-swap papers were revoked and she was thrown back behind bars. She wrote that she’d lie in bed for hours, reliving the entire ordeal, later waking up shivering on top of drenched sheets.
The nightmares haven’t completely subsided, she told NPR’s Fresh Air earlier this year, but she is determined to move forward and live her life with meaning. Dignity. Purpose. “Positivity,” she says.
She is warm, kind, when interviewing for this story. After all she has gone through, she has every reason to be the opposite: curt, withdrawn, or closed off. “She’s a giver,” says Brianna Turner, a former Mercury teammate now with the Sky. When asked what others can learn from Griner, Turner said it is “to always lead with kindness.”
Griner doesn’t just want to survive; she wants to center joy in everything that she does. Her pain and her joy coexist these days. Some days are harder than others. But each day, with the joy of her son, her wife, her teammates, and her activism around the world, she continues to find her center. Ground herself. Think of nature. Think of those trees. Falling, decaying, regrowing.
Griner had been a star for the Mercury since being drafted no. 1 in 2013; she was a 6-foot-9, generational player who could dominate inside the paint and defend anyone who dared come into it. Like most WNBA players, she supplemented her salary by playing overseas in the offseason and led her Russian team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, to unprecedented success, with four EuroLeague titles, including in the 2021 season. She had become quite famous in Russia and beloved in her seven seasons there; young girls would regularly line up after games, seeking her autograph.
Griner was stopped after arriving at the Moscow airport on February 17, 2022, when security discovered two vape cartridges containing oil derived from cannabis in her bag. She had forgotten to leave them at her home in Phoenix after a rushed morning in which she was running late to the airport. Griner has a medical license to use cannabis in Arizona to help heal from various basketball injuries, but the substance is illegal in Russia. She had just 0.7 grams of oil between the two vape pens, but that was considered by Russian authorities to be a “significant amount”—punishable by five to 10 years and a fine that would amount to about $10,000—and she was quickly detained.
Russia invaded Ukraine a week later, on February 24, and in early May, the U.S. State Department classified Griner as “wrongfully detained.” According to experts in the diplomatic recovery of political prisoners, Griner had become a pawn in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plans. “With Brittney, it was very, very clear that she was targeted because of who she is,” says Mickey Bergman, a negotiator who works on behalf of the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that negotiates to free international political prisoners and hostages around the world. To Bergman, it was clear that Griner fit the definition of “a political prisoner.”
She always found some means to put herself together. And stand straight, and put her shoulders back, and face everything that was coming her way.Alex Boykov
She had been charged with violating Article 229.1 of the Russian criminal code—crossing a customs border with illegal narcotics—a crime that nearly always results in a conviction in Russian courts. According to court statistics, only one of about 385 criminal trials in 2023 resulted in an acquittal. Still, she and her legal team didn’t expect the maximum sentence of 10 years, especially since the crime was not intentional and she had no previous criminal record.
In early August 2022, about six months after she was initially detained, Griner was sentenced to nine years in the secluded penal colony in Mordovia known as Correctional Colony No. 2 or IK-2, where she sewed army uniforms and cut fabric for 10 or more hours a day in the brutal, below-freezing winter. In her memoir, she wrote about her fears that she would never make it back to see her family.
“We are used to unjust court decisions,” says Alex Boykov, a Moscow attorney and one of her lawyers. “By a landslide, she got the worst sentence in the history of the modern Russian criminal court system [for this specific crime].”
After her initial detainment in February 2022, Boykov would visit her at the detention facility. The two became close, as he saw Griner when she was at her lowest, and he tried to comfort her while she cried. He saw how she blamed herself for her mistake and listened as she contemplated the worst-case scenario—a maximum sentence. He recalls that she shared feeling like her life and her basketball career were over.
Writing has long served as a coping mechanism for her. She turned to it once again, writing in the margins of a sudoku book she had in her cell. It helped her both count the days and express what she was fearing. “Losing my mental. Don’t know if I will survive,” she wrote in one entry, according to her memoir. She also wrote about how she tried to keep faith in God and that she’d find a way home when she cried herself to sleep many nights. And she wrote about how she came close to ending her own life but couldn’t, knowing what it would do to her family.
Boykov tried to get Griner to focus on getting through each day. What stood out to Boykov, from the time he first met her in the customs building on the day her nightmare began at the airport, was her courage. “She always found some means to put herself together. And stand straight, and put her shoulders back, and face everything that was coming her way,” he says. As Russia’s war with Ukraine intensified, he explained to her the history of prisoner swaps and how that might affect her chances of serving prison time. “We always talked about the possible exchange from the first day until the last day,” Boykov says.
Week after week, they each shared stories from their lives. Boykov plays basketball recreationally, and they talked about their shared love of hoops, especially low-post moves and ’90s NBA nostalgia. Boykov said that he told Griner she would get home soon and asked her to mail him a signed Charles Barkley basketball once she did. He even managed to retrieve her favorite Texas barbecue sauce—Stubb’s—from her luggage and attempted to cook brisket for her a few times, sneaking it into the facility for her to eat during their meetings. “It cheered her up and reminded her of home,” Boykov says, though he admits it was overcooked and the meat was too dry for a real Texan like Griner.
Maria Blagovolina, her other Russian lawyer, also visited weekly. “We were kind of a bridge between her and her family,” Blagovolina says. “We were trying to relay all the support that she was getting. Not only us, but in fact through the world.”
Blagovolina and Boykov worked relentlessly, as did Griner’s agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, and the team at the Wasserman agency, including Mike Pickles (Wasserman’s chief legal officer) and Rica Rodman (executive director of the Wasserman Foundation). Coincidentally, Rodman had worked in the Clinton White House, and her many connections helped the team quickly get in touch with both President Joe Biden’s staff and the State Department. Pickles is fluent in Russian after spending years in the country during and after college and intimately understood Russia’s unjust criminal justice system. “It was an incredibly precarious situation,” Pickles says, “but you do have to go in with a dose of reality of what you’re dealing with and base your decisions on that.”
Soon, Colas and the Wasserman team were in touch with the State Department regularly, especially with Roger D. Carstens, the U.S. special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, who focuses on negotiating for the release of American hostages and Americans classified as being “wrongfully detained” around the world. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and Joshua Geltzer on the National Security Council also played key roles. Reaching out to political advisers such as Fiona Hill (who specializes in Russian hostage diplomacy), Karen Finney, and Tina Flournoy, Colas worked day and night, urgently trying to bring Griner home.
Initially, the group kept Griner’s arrest quiet, per the State Department’s advice, and it was under wraps until The New York Times broke the news on March 5. The State Department announced in May 2022 that Griner had been classified as “wrongfully detained,” setting in motion negotiations for a prisoner swap, while Colas and the team at Wasserman focused on keeping attention on Griner’s plight. They created the viral #WeAreBG hashtag, which became the campaign’s rallying cry for Griner’s release. All her life, Griner had never fit in, as a gay, tall, Black women’s basketball player, and she detailed the severe bullying she experienced in her 2014 memoir, In My Skin. She was—and still is—often told she looked and sounded like a boy. #WeAreBG sent a message to her when she needed it most: You are us. We are you. You belong here at home with us.
“I was told by so many that her identity—her intersectional identity—is going to be the reason why it’s going to be hard to get her home,” says Colas, “[and that] ‘women’s sports don’t matter.’ This is not a new sentiment for me. … I was like, OK, well, how do we flip that into a strength?”
“Every American, every person can see a piece of themselves in her,” says Colas, who made sure to highlight photos of Griner in a USA jersey during that time. The Women’s National Basketball Players Association began to mobilize, especially under the efforts of WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike and vice president Breanna Stewart. The duo continued to raise their voices to bring Griner home, especially on social media, never missing a day to remind the world how many days it had been since Griner had been detained. So many other players worked hard behind the scenes, too, such as Elizabeth Williams, A’ja Wilson, Alysha Clark, Stefanie Dolson, Sue Bird, Amanda Zahui B., Erica Wheeler, Natalie Achonwa, Reshanda Gray, and Natasha Cloud.
The union worked tirelessly, setting up Zoom calls with experts on Russian political prisoners and foreign affairs in an effort to be as informed as possible as they fought to bring Griner home. She was more than their teammate, their opponent. They saw her as their sister. And they’d continue to show up, day after day, keeping her story alive.
“It will have to always be seen and remembered as the most beautiful time that the women’s basketball community, at every level, [came together],” says Terri Carmichael Jackson, executive director of the WNBPA. “That drum never stopped beating. Being relentless and keeping [Griner’s] name top of mind for anyone who would listen. … And anybody who didn’t think they were going to listen … we were going to make them make time to listen.”
It heavily weighed on players to imagine what Griner was enduring. But Kozar, the Mercury’s president, remembers Diana Taurasi, a longtime teammate and friend of Griner’s, reminding him: “BG’s the one going through it.” Meaning: It’s not about us; let’s keep fighting for BG.
Yet every time Kozar received a letter from Griner, he says she’d ask about the team.
Even in her darkest hour, she was still thinking of others.
What happened next was a blur. The trial began on July 1, 2022. Her Russian teammates testified about her exemplary character and how beloved she was in the country. Griner clutched the bars of the cage she was held in, peering out into the courtroom, when her sentence was read. Nine years. Repeating that number in Russian: devyat. “I was numb,” she wrote in her memoir.
Griner was transported to the penal colony in Mordovia. She tried to come to grips with her sentence, starting to memorize her release date: October 20, 2031. “I’m an inmate now,” she told herself, according to her memoir.
On one of Boykov’s visits with Griner at Mordovia, she showed him a letter she had received from a female police officer after her sentencing. Boykov still gets emotional when recalling the contents of the letter now. The officer, he says, wrote that she liked Griner and apologized for what had happened to her in her country. Boykov says the woman wrote that Griner’s sentence was harsh and unusual, and in closing she wished Griner the best.
They all felt powerless—that officer, Griner, her lawyers in Russia and at home, her loved ones—until finally, after months of hard labor in the freezing cold and living under excruciatingly difficult conditions, she got word that a deal had been struck. She was coming home. After nearly 10 months in prison, she was finally released on December 8, 2022, in a prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death.” “I spoke with Brittney Griner,” President Biden said at the time. “She’s safe. She’s on a plane. She’s on her way home after months of being unjustly detained in Russia, held in intolerable circumstances.
Giving yourself grace, but then also holding yourself accountable, I think they go hand in hand. I think that’s just really hard to do, though. Still working on it. It’s going better.Griner
“Brittney will soon be back in the arms of her loved ones,” Biden continued, “and she should have been there all along.”
She was first flown to Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, where she met Carstens from the State Department. She and Bout shook hands and briefly exchanged a few words. She was, naturally, thrilled to be coming home, but as she wrote in her memoir, she still feared something would go wrong—and that she would be sent back to prison. It wasn’t until she was on the second plane that reality began to set in.
She was coming home.
“I think the toughest part of Brittney Griner’s case was that we weren’t able to get to a deal to also free Paul Whelan,” says Carstens, referring to a former U.S. Marine who remains in a Russian prison on charges of espionage. “For months we tried to work something out that would bring both Brittney and Paul home, but unfortunately at the time the only option was Brittney Griner or nobody. I think that was the right decision, though it was a tough one. We’re still working on this. I’m confident we will bring Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich [a Wall Street Journal journalist recently sentenced to 16 years] home.”
Griner was then flown to a U.S. Army base in San Antonio. Her wife stood on the tarmac at 4 a.m. and watched the white plane emerge, its brightness slicing through the dark sky. They wept with gratitude.
Readjusting to life in Phoenix was difficult, as she processed everything she had been through. “For months, I’d been dealing with my anguish alone,” she wrote in her memoir, “in my head, in a cell, in the dark. It felt vulnerable to now share it with the world.” What she had gone through, she wrote, fundamentally “rewired [her] brain.” Life would never return to “normal.”
Having to discover a new normal was to be expected, according to Danielle Gilbert, an expert on hostage recovery and hostage diplomacy who consulted with Colas and the Wasserman agency during Griner’s detainment.
It’s typical, Gilbert says, for those who are released to struggle with their freedom, deal with painful flashbacks, or even have trouble readjusting to others being in their space. “They have nightmares for the rest of their lives about being back in captivity,” Gilbert says. “There’s many ways in which we expect, like, ‘Oh. They’re home. It’s over. They’re done. It’s all good news.’ But that’s actually when the very long healing process just starts.”
Part of that process was returning to hoops, something that Griner decided to do almost immediately. “Hey, Lindz,” Colas remembers Griner telling her while in San Antonio. “I want to play. Tell the Mercury that I want to play now.”
She made it official while on the plane from San Antonio to Phoenix, according to Kozar, who was there, along with Diana Taurasi and then-GM Jim Pitman. Maybe it was because of the feeling Griner had when she picked up a ball for the first time at the base, eyeing a makeshift hoop. As she described in her memoir, she tried to dunk—and immediately felt pain. Her back ached for days, but she knew she wanted to play again. She needed hoops. It had long been her refuge. The place she felt accepted.
Free.
But it would take a long time until basketball felt that way again. She was out of shape after so much time in custody and off the court. She’d smoked cigarettes while in prison to manage her distress. But she kept showing up to the Mercury practice facility ahead of the 2023 season, trying to work her hardest. “Her light was still there,” says former teammate Brianna Turner, who is also a vice president within the WNBPA. “That takes a lot of tenacity and will. … She easily could have just retired and just did her own thing and stayed private.”
Although she didn’t feel she was operating at full capacity last season, she knew she had to give herself grace, saying as much during her first press conference after returning to play that spring: “It’s going to take time,” she said. Kozar admired how she truly embodied that sentiment. It wasn’t the days that she pushed herself beyond exhaustion that moved him; it was, he says, “the days she raised her hand and said, ‘Hey. I just can’t do this today.’”
About two-thirds of the way through last season, she took a few days away from the team to focus on herself and missed three games. “That takes a lot of courage and strength,” Kozar says, “when all of these people are watching to see if you’re back on the court. It takes a lot of courage to say, like, ‘Yes, the fans want me to be there. Yes, my teammates want me to be there, but … I need to show up for myself first.’”
Even as Griner now flows on the court like she used to, finishing underneath through contact, posting up wherever she pleases, she is still working on giving herself more of that grace. Being kinder to herself. “That’s super hard,” Griner says. “Especially for top athletes. … We want everything to go right. We just want things to be perfect, and it’s just not realistic. Giving yourself grace, but then also holding yourself accountable, I think they go hand in hand. I think that’s just really hard to do, though. Still working on it. It’s going better.”
Bash has given her new joy, new purpose. She’s in awe of how curious he is. How aware of everything he is. “He’s very eyes open. Nosy. He’s very nosy,” she says. Even in these first few weeks, she’s already noticing changes in him. “It’s crazy,” she says. “I can already tell differences in just his skin. His pigment’s coming in more and more. And he was all crumpled up; he’s starting to stretch out more.”
When she isn’t on the court, or home with her growing family, she is working with the WNBPA on its next collective bargaining agreement. Carmichael Jackson remembers how adamant Griner was during their first conversation when she returned home about wanting to be involved more. Since then, Griner has attended meetings and, along with other player leaders and members, is helping shape the list of priorities and concerns with the current CBA.
Griner is also involved with the Bring Our Families Home campaign, which works with the families of Americans who are held hostage or wrongfully detained overseas. She is committed to that work and passionate about using her platform to help others. To remind them—and the world—that they are not forgotten. “Definitely going to keep fighting for that,” Griner says. She wants people to know they can help, too, by researching hostages or political prisoners from around the country and writing to senators. “Flooding it. Calling for action,” Griner says. “It goes a long way, especially when a lot of voices get together to make things happen.”
Her Wasserman team became close with Whelan’s family, collaborating and sharing information, and they have remained in touch. And during Griner’s detention, Colas says she also worked with the legal counsel for another Russian detainee, Trevor Reed, a former Marine who was freed in April 2022, and the family of Emad Shargi, an American citizen who was wrongfully detained in Iran for five years before being released last September. More recently, Colas has been introduced to Gershkovich’s mother and colleagues from the Wall Street Journal who have been hoping to secure his release.
According to Colas, since Griner returned home, she has been using her social media to keep attention on detainees, particularly those in Iran and Venezuela.
No matter how difficult it is to think about, Griner is committed to continuing to spread awareness. For Whelan, for Gershkovich, and for every American still wrongfully held abroad.
Home, she now knows, isn’t just a place. It’s about community. It’s about giving. It’s about using her power in service of others, as they did for her.
But she has to continue to ground herself, too. In a way, her son reminds her to stay firmly in the present. To embrace joy, wherever she can find it. She loves how curious kids are, how they are always trying to figure things out. “You can recognize that they just saw something for the first time,” Griner says. “It’s just the innocence in them.”
It’s an innocence that no adult can return to. But even for just a moment, she can grasp what it’s like, seeing the world through Bash’s eyes, full of possibility. And in this moment, so is she. Resilient and present, she is much more than the Brittney Griner that came back.
She is the Brittney Griner that kept going.
