Brittney Griner Says She Considered Suicide in Russian Confinement

During the Wednesday, May 1, episode of the ABC News program, Griner, 33, opened up about being detained after THC was found in her luggage at a Russian airport. The basketball star said that after signing a “form written in Russian” that she “couldn’t read,” she was handcuffed and taken to a 7×7 cell with “a metal bed and a hole in the ground for the toilet” where she was forced to use her own clothes to clean herself.

“I had a couple of shirts a couple pair of sweats, the shoes on my feet,” she told Roberts, 63. “One of my shirts, I ripped it up and used one to clean myself and one as my toilet paper with my dirty hole in the ground with feces all over it. That was the moment I felt the dirtiest and less than a human.”

She was later transferred to IK1, where she was put in a group cell that contained a knife left behind by a guard after lunch. Griner described her sleeping area as being filled with “dirt, grime and absolute filth,” calling it the “dirtiest” she felt during her nine-month prison stay.

Griner recalled her mattress, which didn’t fit her 6’9 build, having “a huge blood stain on it,” and that there were some months when prisoners received no toilet paper. Their toothpaste, meanwhile, was 15 years past its expiration date.

“We used to put it on the black mold to kill the mold on the walls,” she said.

When it came to the food, Griner told Roberts that mornings consisted of a “really thick porridge” that was “more like cement,” while dinner was “a little piece of fish with nothing but bones in it.”

Griner noted that 15 minutes of recreational time outside would often turn into two hours, and the prisoners would have to “bang on the bars” begging the guards to let them back in. Eventually, she was forced to cut off her dreadlocks because they kept freezing. “You gotta do what you gotta do to survive,” she added.

As she recalled the harrowing conditions, Griner confessed that it was in her first few weeks in confinement that she considered suicide. “I wanted to take my life so more than once in those first weeks, I felt like leaving here so badly,” she shared while holding back tears. “I didn’t think I could get through what I needed to get through.”

Ultimately, however, Griner decided to push forward for the benefit of her loved ones. “I was just like, what if they didn’t release my body to my family? I can’t put them through that. I have to endure this.”

Griner’s final stop was at a penal colony called IK2, which Roberts described as one of the “worst prisons in Russia.” Griner, for her part, called it a work camp where there was “no rest.”

“Conditions were rough in the buildings there were about 50-60 women in my room, one bathroom, three toilets, no hot water and a long farm-style sink where everybody is washing all types of body parts,” Griner recalled, noting that spiders would make nests above her bed — another reason for cutting her hair.

Before she was released, Griner revealed that she had to write a letter to the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, to ask for “forgiveness.”

“I didn’t want to do it,” she said, “but I wanted to come home.”