Brittney Griner, a professional American basketball player, was detained in Russia in February 2022 after vape cartridges containing hashish oil were found in her luggage at a Moscow airport, an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison under Russian law.

Griner pleaded guilty, explaining that she had packed the cartridges inadvertently and had no intention of breaking Russian law, but her nine-year sentence was widely regarded as unusually harsh compared to typical penalties for similar offenses in Russia, which often result in lighter sentences or probation for Russian citizens.

Her defense team argued for leniency, citing the small quantity of hashish oil and her positive contributions to Russian sports, but the court dismissed these arguments, reflecting the strained U.S.-Russia relations and the political undertones of her case.

Griner’s detention occurred during heightened tensions between the U.S. and Russia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with experts suggesting that her arrest was politically motivated and that she was being used as a bargaining chip in geopolitical negotiations.

The U.S. government classified Griner as 'wrongfully detained,' signaling concerns that her case was being exploited for political purposes and underscoring the discriminatory and strategic nature of her imprisonment as a Black LGBTQ+ athlete.

Griner’s identity as a Black, openly gay woman further shaped the narrative of her detention, with commentators arguing that her race, gender, and sexual orientation contributed to the muted initial response and highlighted broader societal biases in valuing athletes differently.

Her status as a professional athlete and public figure brought significant media attention to her case, illustrating how sports, gender, and politics intersect in the treatment of high-profile individuals in international disputes.

Griner’s celebrity status amplified calls for her release, with figures across sports, politics, and advocacy groups rallying for her freedom, demonstrating how public figures can become symbols in geopolitical conflicts.

Her detention was part of a broader pattern of wrongful detentions by authoritarian governments, which use high-profile individuals like Griner to gain leverage in diplomatic disputes, as evidenced by Russia’s interest in exchanging her for Viktor Bout, a notorious arms dealer convicted in the U.S.

Brittney Griner’s release was ultimately secured through a high-profile prisoner swap in December 2022, in which the United States exchanged her for Viktor Bout after months of negotiations.

Key events in the negotiations included a July phone call between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, during which Blinken proposed a substantial offer to release both Griner and Paul Whelan, though Russia insisted on a one-for-one swap involving only Griner and Bout.

The final exchange took place in Abu Dhabi, facilitated by UAE officials, marking a rare moment of cooperation between the U.S. and Russia amidst strained relations due to the Ukraine conflict.

Griner’s experience in the Russian penal colony was marked by harsh conditions, including limited access to basic amenities such as hot water and adequate medical care, with former inmates likening such facilities to legal slavery systems involving overcrowding and forced labor.

She faced additional challenges due to her inability to speak Russian, which hindered her ability to understand the laws and protect herself, while witnessing the physical toll and deaths of other inmates added to the psychological strain of her imprisonment.

In her final weeks in the penal colony, Griner cut her trademark dreadlocks to prevent them from freezing in the cold conditions, a decision that underscored the severe discomfort she endured during her incarceration.

Her identity as a Black, queer, female athlete amplified the complexity of her detention in Russia, as she became a potent cultural symbol in a country known for its hostility toward LGBTQ+ individuals and racial minorities.

The muted initial response to Griner’s detention highlighted systemic biases, with commentators suggesting that her race, sexual orientation, and gender contributed to the lack of widespread public and media attention compared to a high-profile male or white athlete in a similar situation.

Griner’s release was celebrated as a victory for marginalized communities, with LGBTQ+ advocates emphasizing the significance of her identity in rallying diverse groups to demand her freedom.

The sports community initially reacted with muted concern due to the precariousness of her situation, but later organized rallies and public calls for her release, highlighting her contributions to the sport and her role as a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ athletes.

Advocacy groups, including LGBTQ+ organizations like GLAAD, celebrated Griner’s release as a victory for marginalized communities, praising the Biden administration’s commitment to securing her freedom despite criticism over the prisoner swap.

Public rallies, such as the one held at the Footprint Center in Phoenix, brought together fans, teammates, and political leaders to celebrate Griner’s contributions and demand action from the U.S. government.

International organizations and human rights groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, urged the U.S. government to negotiate Griner’s freedom, highlighting her wrongful detention as a political pawn by Russia.

Diplomatic efforts were central to Griner’s case, as the U.S. State Department classified her as 'wrongfully detained,' enabling specialized government channels to negotiate her release.

Former U.S. diplomat Bill Richardson worked independently with Griner’s family and Russian officials to explore potential prisoner exchange deals, demonstrating the importance of non-governmental diplomatic initiatives in her case.

Griner’s detention abruptly halted her professional basketball career, as she missed the entire 2022 WNBA season while serving her sentence in Russia.

Her return to the United States marked a triumphant comeback to the WNBA, where she signed a one-year deal with the Phoenix Mercury and quickly regained her dominant form, earning an All-Star starter designation in the 2023 season.

Griner’s experience has catalyzed changes in the WNBA, including improved travel standards and heightened awareness of the financial pressures that lead players to compete overseas.

Since returning home, Griner has faced psychological and emotional challenges stemming from her time in a Russian penal colony, including feelings of vulnerability and the need to heal her mind, body, and spirit.

Griner has publicly addressed her adjustment to life post-incarceration by emphasizing the importance of collective support and encouraging advocacy for other wrongfully detained Americans.

Her arrest and imprisonment sparked global discussions about the inequities faced by female athletes, including the financial necessity for WNBA players to compete overseas, and the broader implications of her wrongful detention as a political pawn.

Griner’s eventual release through a controversial prisoner swap underscored the complexities of international diplomacy and reignited debates about the treatment of marginalized groups in sports.

The prisoner swap involving Griner and Viktor Bout has raised concerns about incentivizing adversaries like Russia to detain American citizens as leverage for future negotiations.

While the swap demonstrated that the U.S. and Russia can negotiate when interests align, analysts caution that it does not signal a broader thaw in relations, as tensions remain high due to issues like the war in Ukraine.

Griner’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment have also underscored the economic inequities in women’s sports, as her need to play overseas to supplement her WNBA income reflects broader gender pay disparities.

Her experience has sparked discussions about the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in sports, with advocates emphasizing the importance of addressing systemic discrimination and improving conditions for marginalized athletes.

Griner has expressed profound gratitude for the support she received during her detention, noting that the letters and advocacy efforts helped her maintain hope and resilience during her imprisonment.

In her reflections, Griner emphasized the importance of collective action, urging her supporters to extend their advocacy to other wrongfully detained Americans, such as Paul Whelan.

Brittney Griner, a professional American basketball player, was detained in Russia in February 2022 after vape cartridges containing hashish oil were found in her luggage at a Moscow airport, an offense punishable by up to 10 years in prison under Russian law.

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A Russian court has sentenced Brittney Griner to 9 years in prison on drug charges

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Guilty was the verdict in Moscow today, and the sentence was severe. A Russian court gave American basketball star Brittney Griner nine years in prison. This was right after the judge convicted her of drug smuggling and possession over the small amount of hash oil she says she accidentally brought into the country. The sentence was just shy of the 9 1/2 years that the prosecution requested. All of this plays out against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and negotiations between the U.S. and Russia for a possible prisoner swap. NPR's Charles Maynes was at the courthouse and has our story.

CHARLES MAYNES, BYLINE: It's been six full months since Brittney Griner was first detained while rushing to catch a flight at a Moscow airport as she arrived for Russian League play. Yet it took just one afternoon at a Moscow courthouse for the judge to rush through closing arguments and issue her verdict.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).

MAYNES: As Griner sat in the cage listening through an interpreter, the judge said the basketball star had knowingly possessed and transported cannabis oil into Russia and should face nine years in prison as a result.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).

MAYNES: "Do you understand the ruling," said the judge to a stone-faced Griner, who responded...

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BRITTNEY GRINER: Yes, I understand, Your Honor.

MAYNES: With the ruling, the judge rejected Griner's explanation that the substance, less than a gram of hash oil, was legally obtained in the U.S. through a doctor to treat chronic pain or that she had never intentionally violated Russian law, a point Griner emphasized in a final plea ahead of the ruling.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GRINER: I made an honest mistake. And I hope that, in your ruling, that it doesn't end my life here.

MAYNES: She also expressed remorse that her actions had embarrassed her fans and teammates at her Russian club, UMMC of Yekaterinburg, where she's played for years.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

GRINER: Again, I want to apologize to my teammates and the organization, UMMC, for any damage that I may have done to them. I never intended on hurting them. This is my second home, and all I wanted to do is just win championships and make them proud.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Non-English language spoken).

MAYNES: Following the ruling, Griner's lawyers said they would appeal a decision that defied sentencing norms even for Russians, who would themselves receive lighter sentences or possibly even probation. The defense team also expressed frustration that the court completely ignored their arguments for leniency based on Griner's contribution to Russian women's basketball, as well as procedural violation of Griner's rights during her arrest. After the hearing, Griner's lawyer, Maria Blagovolina, acknowledged that while her client did not expected miracles, the shock of a nine-year sentence still lingered with all of them.

MARIA BLAGOVOLINA: We feel disappointment. You know, when we saw Brittney, I think it was Tuesday. And we told her, see you on Thursday. And she said, see you on doomsday. So looks like she was right.

MAYNES: It appears a legal case that has unfolded against the backdrop of plummeting U.S.-Russian relations over the conflict in Ukraine now moves entirely into the political arena. President Biden immediately issued a statement condemning the ruling. And outside the courthouse, the U.S. Embassy's deputy chief of mission, Elizabeth Rood, said the U.S. government would keep fighting to free Griner and other detained Americans in Russia.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

ELIZABETH ROOD: This is a miscarriage of justice. The U.S. Department of State has determined that Ms. Griner was wrongfully detained. Nothing in today's decision changes that determination.

MAYNES: The White House has already acknowledged it made a substantial proposal to Russia to free Griner and another American, former Marine Paul Whelan. It's reported that the U.S. would be willing to exchange convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, currently in a prison in Illinois. The Kremlin has suggested closed-door negotiations might yield results once Griner's trial was over but said the talks shouldn't be public. But now that that's the case, and Grinder's nine-year sentence a reality, the price of what Moscow seeks in these negotiations may very well have gone up. Charles Maynes, NPR News, Moscow. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Griner pleaded guilty, explaining that she had packed the cartridges inadvertently and had no intention of breaking Russian law, but her nine-year sentence was widely regarded as unusually harsh compared to typical penalties for similar offenses in Russia, which often result in lighter sentences or probation for Russian citizens.

Her defense team argued for leniency, citing the small quantity of hashish oil and her positive contributions to Russian sports, but the court dismissed these arguments, reflecting the strained U.S.-Russia relations and the political undertones of her case.

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Russian court sentences Brittney Griner to 9 years, raising pressure on Biden

A Russian court Thursday sentenced U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner to nine years in a penal colony after convicting her on a drug charge, a harsh penalty that keeps her fate entwined with the geopolitical showdown over the war in Ukraine and ramps up already intense pressure on President Joe Biden to win her release.

The U.S. government contends that she is among several Americans who have been “wrongfully detained” by Russia, used as bargaining chips in the increasingly hostile relationship between Moscow and Washington. The Biden administration has offered a prisoner swap involving Griner, but Russian officials said it was premature to discuss a deal while her case was underway.

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Now that the trial is concluded, Biden faces a difficult choice between standing firm on his proposal to trade for Griner and another American, Paul Whelan, or sweetening the offer somehow, with either position liable to draw domestic criticism.

Meanwhile the Kremlin can use them as leverage, with no incentive to resolve the cases quickly. Griner’s supporters, voicing horror at the verdict and sentence, are clamoring for the president to do something, while the administration is wary of giving in to Russian tactics it has all but labeled blackmail.

“My administration will continue to work tirelessly and pursue every possible avenue to bring Brittney and Paul Whelan home safely as soon as possible,” Biden said in a statement after the verdict.

Griner, 31, one of her sport’s biggest global stars, sat mostly expressionless, eyes downcast, leaning her long frame toward the bars of the defendant’s box in a cramped courtroom outside Moscow to hear as the words of the judge, Anna Sotnikova, were quietly translated for her. She had already pleaded guilty, and conviction is all but certain in Russian courts, so the verdict was a foregone conclusion; the real question was about sentencing.

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The answer was devastating. The sentence was near the 10-year maximum for her conviction for attempting to smuggle narcotics into the country, based on two vape cartridges containing hashish oil found in Griner’s luggage when she arrived in February, a week before President Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces to Ukraine.

She and her legal team had hoped for a more lenient penalty based on her guilty plea, her statement that she had not meant to take the cartridges to Russia, and testimony that she used the substance legally in the United States to manage pain.

“I made an honest mistake, and I hope that in your ruling that it doesn’t end my life here,” she said before the sentencing.

She told the court that while she took responsibility for her actions, “I had no intent to break Russian law.” She said that after recovering from a bout of COVID, she had packed hurriedly to rejoin the Russian team she plays for in the WNBA offseason, and had accidentally left the cartridges in her luggage.

Griner’s defense team called the ruling “absolutely unreasonable,” said the court had “completely ignored all the evidence of the defense, and most importantly, the guilty plea,” and vowed to appeal. Elizabeth Rood, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, attended the court session and called the result “a miscarriage of justice.”

Russian officials have insisted that Griner’s case is simply the justice system running its course, with no political overtones — a claim that their U.S. counterparts and many Western analysts dismissed as absurd.

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William Pomeranz, a Russia expert and acting director of the Kennan Institute, a research group in Washington, noted that Griner was sentenced not to a prison but to a penal colony, which tends to mean a more remote location — many are in Siberia — and harsher conditions.

“She’s probably going to go to a penal colony that’s in the middle of Russia where she won’t know anybody,” he added. “They won’t be able to come and visit. Penal colonies can sometimes be very severe. It will be a tremendous test of her mental state if she ends up going to a penal colony.”

The United States has few options, he said. “It will just depend on the Russians and how fast they want to make a deal.”

Fellow basketball players, male and female, and basketball executives took to social media to voice support for Griner and grief at the verdict. Griner’s team, the Phoenix Mercury, said in a statement: “We remain heartbroken for her, as we have every day for nearly six months. We remain grateful to and confident in the public servants working every day to return her to her family and us.”

With Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the indiscriminate destruction it has caused, relations between Washington and Moscow are more confrontational and bitter than they have been in decades. The United States has rallied the West to send arms and other aid to Ukraine, and to punish Moscow with economic sanctions, looking for opportunities to ratchet up the pressure.

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The two sides have made prisoner exchanges before, most recently in April, when Russia released Trevor Reed, an American held on what his family said was a bogus assault charge, in return for a Russian pilot convicted in the United States of cocaine trafficking charges. But rarely have proposed swaps come amid such tension, or involved anyone as prominent as Griner.

In a sign of how high the stakes are for Washington, Griner’s fate was among the topics discussed last Friday by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, in their first direct conversation since before the invasion.

The Biden administration has offered to trade Griner and Whelan for Viktor Bout, who is serving a 25-year sentence for a 2011 conviction on a federal charge of conspiring to sell weapons to people posing as terrorists intent on killing Americans. Whelan, detained in Russia since 2018, was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years.

Russia made an unspecified “bad faith” counteroffer, the White House said Monday, which U.S. officials said they did not consider serious.

John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council, told reporters Thursday, “I don’t think it would be helpful to Brittney or to Paul for us to talk more publicly about where we are in the talks and what the president might or might not be willing to do.”

“Conversations are ongoing at various levels,” he added.

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If Biden sticks to his initial offer, he could face accusations of not doing enough.

Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, and other supporters have mounted an effective public campaign to pressure the president to win her release. Supporters worry about her treatment in a country where anti-American and anti-gay vitriol are deeply embedded in popular views and official propaganda. Images of a grim-faced Griner being led, handcuffed, in and out of court, towering over her armed guards, have become commonplace in U.S. and international media.

The administration could make a more attractive offer, but U.S. officials already worry that deals for prisoners could encourage hostile foreign governments to detain Americans on trumped-up charges in exchange for concessions like freeing their own wrongdoers. Some Republicans have already complained that Biden’s existing offer creates such an incentive.

A 6-foot-9 center, Griner won a college national championship with Baylor in 2012, a WNBA championship with the Mercury in 2014, Olympic gold medals with the U.S. team at the 2016 and 2020 games, and four EuroLeague championships with the Russian team UMMC Yekaterinburg. Like many players in the WNBA, where salaries are much lower than in the NBA, Griner — who also played one season for a professional team in China — has played overseas to supplement her income.

Griner’s detention occurred during heightened tensions between the U.S. and Russia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with experts suggesting that her arrest was politically motivated and that she was being used as a bargaining chip in geopolitical negotiations.

The U.S. government classified Griner as 'wrongfully detained,' signaling concerns that her case was being exploited for political purposes and underscoring the discriminatory and strategic nature of her imprisonment as a Black LGBTQ+ athlete.

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American basketball star Brittney Griner has been detained in Russia since February. She has been facing drug possession charges for carrying vape cartridges in her luggage that contained cannabis oil. The charges carry a potential sentence of up to 10 years in jail.

Griner pleaded guilty to the drug charges in Russian court Thursday, while stressing that she had packed in a hurry and not intended to break Russian law. Regardless of Thursday’s plea, observers have not expected Griner to receive justice in the Russian legal system.

Griner’s wife, Cherelle, has accurately called her a “political pawn” caught up in the fraught relationship between the U.S. and Russia amid the latter’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. There should be little doubt that Griner’s detention is bigger than vape cartridges.

With frustrations increasingly being voiced by Griner’s family that President Joe Biden and his administration haven’t been doing enough to help her, Griner sent a letter to Biden on Monday asking for assistance for herself and other American detainees. For example, Paul Whelan, who also previously served in the Marines, was accused of being a spy and sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020.

“As I sit here in a Russian prison, alone with my thoughts and without the protection of my wife, family, friends, Olympic jersey, or any accomplishments, I’m terrified I might be here forever,” Griner wrote in her July 4 letter to Biden.

Marine veteran Trevor Reed knows a thing or two about what Griner and Whelan are going through. Reed was detained in Russia for three years before being released in April as part of a prisoner exchange.

“There is no justice in Russia,” Reed told CNN in June. “Brittney and Paul will not receive justice in Russia. They’re not going to receive a fair trial, they will not receive a fair investigation. They will be there as hostages until the United States gets them out.”

He added that Griner was likely to be treated worse in Russia because of her race and sexual orientation, saying that the country “systematically discriminates” against Black and LGBTQ+ people.

There is only so much the Biden administration can do with Griner in the custody of an authoritarian government known for making examples out of political prisoners, and likely looking for a bargaining chip as it continues its barbaric invasion of Ukraine. Though as demonstrated by Reed’s release, there are options. It must not take three years.

At the very least, for now, Biden and his team can control how they communicate and reassure Griner’s family. And on that front, it seems the administration had been coming up short.

Griner’s family and friends had criticized the Biden administration’s handling of her case, and called for the president to meet with them. On Wednesday, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris finally had a phone call with Cherelle Griner.

“The president called Cherelle to reassure her that he is working to secure Brittney’s release as soon as possible, as well as the release of Paul Whelan and other U.S. nationals who are wrongfully detained or held hostage in Russia and around the world,” the White House said in a statement after the call. “He also read her a draft of the letter the president is sending to Brittney today.”

That statement also noted that top administration officials have already had calls with Cherelle Griner in recent weeks, and said Biden has directed his national security team to stay in “regular contact” with the Griner family. A U.S. diplomat said they delivered Biden’s letter to Griner at Thursday’s proceedings.

Biden’s call with Griner’s wife was an initial step, and the ultimate goal must be a quick release for Griner and other political prisoners. There is much work left for the administration to do, including a continual commitment to assure Griner’s family that the U.S. is exploring all possible options to secure her release. And hopefully the attention will elevate the pressure to help return other Americans like Whelan as well.

“Write them, call them, annoy them, don’t leave them alone,” Reed said in June about pressuring federal representatives to act. “Tell them you want Brittney home and you want the rest of the Americans who are being wrongfully detained home, and you want it done now.”

Add us to the list of people looking to raise the pressure on the Biden administration to bring home wrongfully detained Americans like Griner, who are essentially hostages, and to bring them home quickly.

The BDN Editorial Board

The Bangor Daily News editorial board members are Publisher Richard J. Warren, Editorial Page Editor Susan Young, Assistant Editorial Page Editor Matt Junker and BDN President Todd Benoit. Young has worked...

Griner’s identity as a Black, openly gay woman further shaped the narrative of her detention, with commentators arguing that her race, gender, and sexual orientation contributed to the muted initial response and highlighted broader societal biases in valuing athletes differently.

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Where does wrongful detention of Brittney Griner go from here?

She will inevitably be labeled a hostage

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Brittney Griner

It seems like years rather than weeks ago that American political prisoner, Trevor Reed, was released from Russia in a prisoner swap. It also seems like years since an American citizen, basketball superstar Brittney Griner, was taken into custody in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for allegedly having hashish oil in her possession.

We now know what many of us believed all along – that Brittney Griner was, in the far too late proclamation by the U.S. government, “wrongfully detained.” In diplomacy-speak, wrongfully detained is synonymous with politically detained, which is super close to what will soon enough inevitably happen – calling Brittney Griner a hostage.

Since the beginning of Griner’s detention, I have done dozens of print, radio, TV, and related interviews, and I have a pretty clear view of how and why we got here.

As I wrote around six weeks ago, if we read between the lines of what’s being said in traditional and social media, we can extract three key reasons why the Griner situation isn’t getting the attention that it should be and would be if it was a different athlete.

The first reason is that Brittney Griner is not a terribly high-profile athlete.

This is patently untrue. As I have been commenting from the minute we learned that she was taken into custody by the Russians, Griner was absolutely the highest-profile American athlete that Russia could have taken into custody as they were preparing for their brutal invasion of Ukraine.

The only other high-profile athletes playing in Russia or transiting through at that time were the very few American players in Russia’s top hockey league, the KHL. None are superstars in their sport, as Griner is.

The second argument for why Griner isn’t getting the attention she should be is that she is LGBTQ.

I have argued that this is a reasonably good hypothesis. It just seems that a straight athlete would be getting a lot more attention and public sympathy than Griner has, in part, yet not in full, because of her sexual orientation. That’s a remarkably harsh position to have to take in 2022, yet it’s clear that Griner doesn’t fit the mold of what many Americans see as that all-American athlete. That one’s sexual or gender orientation should drive the American public’s level of sympathy for one of their own top athletes is a shame, but here we are.

The third and most commonly cited reason for Brittany Griner getting less attention than another athlete in a similar situation is that she’s Black.

This argument holds little weight with me. Yes, it makes sense that in comparison to a high-profile white athlete, some people are simply going to care less about a Black athlete. Again, that’s a harsh analysis, yet not unaligned with many things going on in the nation today.

But I think this is a reductive argument that crumbles under the weight of the analogy that I usually use during TV and radio broadcasts about the Griner case – and that is, what if this was Kyrie Irving?

I like to use Kyrie Irving as an analogy because he is a highly controversial Black athlete. Obviously, NBA players don’t have to have second jobs in places like Russia, Turkey, and China, to make ends meet, as the WNBA women do. But just imagine that Kyrie Irving was traveling alone through Moscow airport. If Irving had been taken into custody by the Russians, I can guarantee that this would be front-page news not just in the sports section but on the front page of all significant papers practically every day. That simply hasn’t been the case with Brittney Griner.

Every day, I am asked where this goes from here. With Griner’s May 19 hearing delayed “one month” (though at the time of writing, no date has been set), I remained convinced of two things: that this goes to a worse place than we are now and that it progresses painfully slowly.

As to the first point, to maximize leverage over the United States, it’s likely that Griner will end up somewhere like a Russian labor camp before she ever steps back into the United States. While Russia does not follow the Rule of Law, it would be neither legally nor politically expedient to just hold Griner in a Moscow jail or prison indefinitely. They need to make her situation worse to turn up the urgency of the case for the American government.

But this indeed won’t happen overnight. As I’ve also been saying all along, the next hearing date will also be delayed, OR we will learn through a TASS Russian media release that Griner was tried, found guilty of all charges, and sentenced (see labor camp, above).

As to what each of us can do, my advice remains the same: Keep talking about it. Make this Brittney as viral as Britney Spears was a year ago. Just as Britney Spears’ freedom from her conservatorship was turbo-charged by the #FreeBritney hashtag, let’s #FreeBrittney now.

This is significantly less trite than it sounds. There is no indication that the American government doesn’t want you to forget about Brittney Griner. As former hostage Jason Rezaian discussed on an excellent recent Washington Post podcast, he always “calls BS” on those parties, saying we should keep detentions such as Griner’s out of the public spotlight. He advocates being as loud as we can be on this, which is why I keep doing interviews on this issue as much as possible.

Ultimately, Brittney Griner will be a political prisoner until the United States and Russia can decide, in crass basketball terms, on a fair player trade. On Friday, we learned that the two sides might actually be in discussions now for a trade involving Griner for notorious convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout, aka the “Merchant of Death.”

Unless this can re-enter and remain in the public spotlight, along with any pressure on the government, Britney Griner will not get the treatment she deserves as one of the greatest basketball players of her generation. That the massive disparity between how NBA and WNBA players are compensated laid the foundation for her to be in this position is the harsh reality these leagues face today. Yet it pales compared to the uncertain reality Griner faces today in a Moscow jail.

A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the chief legal analyst for Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world.

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Leave no one behind: Building an LGBTQ+ movement for all

A just society is only achievable by investing in dignity of the marginalized

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Despite the expansion of LGBTQ+ civil rights and liberties in D.C., some of which we proudly attribute to GLAA’s stalwart activism for the past 51 years, the most vulnerable members of our community continue to suffer from poverty, homelessness, criminalization, discrimination, social isolation, and preventable death. A jaw-dropping 40% of homeless youth in the U.S. identify as LGBTQ+, LGBTQ+ people experience hunger at twice the rate of straight people, and right here in D.C., the Office of Human Rights reports that employers are more likely to interview a less-qualified cisgender job applicant than a more-qualified transgender applicant.

So for our 2022 candidate ratings, GLAA decided to emphasize that racial and economic justice are LGBTQ+ justice issues. While we recognize the importance of openly LGBTQ+ candidates, we know one’s identity does not indicate where they stand on critical issues. Something many of us have learned the hard way, and something GLAA leadership recognizes not championing sooner as a mistake. What matters most is a candidate’s demonstrated record and vision to support the LGBTQ+ community in its entirety.

It is not enough for candidates to respond only to the needs of those who historically have held the most power in the LGBTQ+ community, particularly white cisgender gay men, in order to tout support of the entire community. The LGBTQ+ community is so many different people, and it is time we push candidates to consider and address us in our entirety. For too long, many LGBTQ+ people have felt rejected and betrayed by our community’s movement priorities, narratives about what our community stands for, and decisions on who is valued and who is selected to represent or lead us. And, while GLAA understands no one politician or organization can erase these community divides, we aim to be intentional in our approach to dismantle that which stands in our entire community’s way toward liberation. That is why, in 2022 we decided to rate candidates on their responses and records of support on issues that impact the most marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community. None of us is free until all of us are free.

Throughout GLAA’s history we have focused on securing LGBTQ+ rights, which have mostly strengthened the legal protections of people privileged enough to take advantage of them. GLAA decided to focus the Leave No One Behind: 2022 Election Guide and questionnaire on racial and economic justice with an LGBTQ+ lens. We did this to build on our victories, such as successfully advocating for the defunding of the Metropolitan Police Department’s vice squad in the 1970s, and to learn from our mistakes.

It is our belief that a just, peaceful, and vibrant society is only achievable by actively investing in the security and dignity of the poor and marginalized members of all our communities. Our questionnaire intentionally acts in solidarity with D.C. anti-poverty, anti-stigma, and anti-overdose campaigns, which are largely led by trans and queer people of color.

Ratings are on a scale of +/-10 points: yes/no responses on questionnaire (+/-2); substance of response (+/-4); and candidate’s public record (+/-4). Candidates earned partial credit for the yes/no category if they partially agreed with the question. Four issues received more than 91% agreement: increasing the affordable housing stock for the poorest residents, housing people using government funded vouchers, fully funding the Office of Human Rights, and better oversight to improve conditions in the DC Jail.

Three issues received 70-79% candidates’ support, and over 90% when including candidates who issued partial support: Repealing the sub-minimum wage, decriminalization of drug use, and reducing the population of D.C. jail by 30%.

Finally, the least supported policies were decriminalization of consensual sex work and divesting from the Metropolitan Police Department and investing in violence prevention and recidivism prevention programs. Even still, there was remarkable consensus: over 2/3 or 66% of candidates who issued total or partial support.

We are encouraged by the remarkable level of consensus on all of our issues, signaling that D.C. is ready for transformative change that at its core addresses the District’s current poverty, unaffordable housing, community and police-based violence, and overdose crises.

GLAA is excited to see more LGBTQ+ people on ballots. More exciting, however, is the number of politicians with fully realized and integrated LGBTQ+ policies in their platforms. Policies that extend across race and class lines. GLAA firmly believes all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, can be stewards of LGBTQ+ liberation. It is our hope that readers find these ratings not as endorsements, but as a starting point to imagine what is possible if local officials are guided by D.C. residents to use their elected power to create new possibilities that leave no one behind.

This opinion piece was signed by the 2022 Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance board of directors.

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Opinions

GLAA has lost its way and should close

Their ratings no longer make an iota of difference in an election

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(Blade file photo by Pete Exis)

The Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), once a respected organization, has now lost its way. It once represented all the members of the LGBTQ+ community, clearly no longer the case, as one can tell based on their questionnaire and ratings. They now represent only the far left in the community and are seeking to represent more than LGBTQ+ people as the statement from their current president suggests. That is not the role of GLAA.

One of the questions in this year’s questionnaire that candidates were asked to respond to is: “Do you support divesting from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to further invest in vital programs, including anti-poverty, violence prevention, crisis intervention, and reentry?” If you didn’t say yes, you lost points. This shows how out of touch they are as the DC Council just voted unanimously, on a first vote, to raise the budget of the MPD. The approved budget also includes increased funding for other vital programs. There’s no indication GLAA ever spoke to Council members on this issue.

Its website lists five officers, all men, with a blurb on each. The one for the president, in addition to listing past and current employment, says, “When he is not organizing, he loves asking people about their Myers Briggs Type (he is ENFP, for the record), doing gay crimes (the basics like drugs and public sex), having Spicy Vanilla sex, dancing to hot beats on the dance floor, practicing vulnerability, plotting revolution against capitalism and other forms of oppression.” He is entitled to his views. But I question how his leading the GLAA represents the broader LGBTQ+ community.

Over the years I’ve had issues with some of what GLAA has done and some of the issues they focused on. But the organization always represented the entire spectrum of the LGBTQ+ community in their questionnaire. Candidates getting a rating from the organization could feel it represented a wide range of opinion in the community. I would hope no candidate tries to pawn the current ratings off as any kind of support from the broader LGBTQ + community.

In the past you always knew their officers, including Rick Rosendall, Bob Summersgill and Jeff Coudriet among others, were involved with D.C. government and knew the issues in-depth. They knew the candidates. Responding to their questionnaire over the years was always interesting. Rick often was the one who spent hours drafting the questions. I always wondered why it was never enough to say yes you agree with their premise. Instead, you had to say it in hundreds, even thousands, of words to earn points. I know as I have filled out questionnaires for many candidates.

Today their website lists nine project areas, none with anything accomplished since 2016. The blog has nothing on any recent budget issues or legislation pertaining to the LGBTQ+ community, only information about the questionnaire. They claim to lobby the Council and monitor government agencies, but there is no indication of any meetings or testimony since 2017.

We can thank GLAA for the fact that today no politician can win office in D.C. without being supportive of the LGBTQ community. However, today their ratings no longer make an iota of difference in an election. Since this is now the only thing they do it’s time to close up shop. We have moved past the time in D.C. when a small number of people can sit in a room rating candidates they don’t know, on issues that don’t represent the community they are supposed to be representing.

So personally, I say thank you to all the people who worked hard over many years for GLAA to help move the LGBTQ community forward. I recognize there is much work still to be done but GLAA is not the organization to do it. We must work to ensure economic and civil justice for all members of our community; health equity for transgender persons; senior housing for our community; and employment opportunities for all, among other issues. But there are other LGBTQ organizations, and community organizations, doing these things better and the few members GLAA might still have should be directed to those other organizations.

If as their website claims they are planning an anniversary celebration, it should be one to honor all the people who in the past 50 years of the organization, worked hard and were successful in making my life and the lives of so many LGBTQ people in the District of Columbia and around the nation better. That would be an exciting way to say goodbye and celebrate the organization whose time it is to close.

Peter Rosenstein is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.

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An unlikely revolution is happening at Christian universities

More than half have enacted LGBTQ non-discrimination policies

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Recent headlines have been filled with messages of doom and gloom for LGBTQ people. From bans on transgender women competing in sports to “don’t say gay” laws, it seems evident that conservative Republicans are freshly committed to rolling back the rights of LGBTQ people across the United States.

Yet, despite such recent setbacks, a student-led movement for LGBTQ inclusion is gaining ground in what would seem to be one of the unlikeliest settings — Christian colleges and universities.

Over the past few years, I’ve collected extensive data on U.S. Christian colleges and universities’ policies toward LGBTQ students. In one study, I found that 55% of all Christian colleges and universities in the United States have nondiscrimination policies inclusive of sexual orientation. In another recent study, I found that nearly half of all Christian colleges and universities are home to officially recognized LGBTQ student groups.

Even some of the most conservative Christian colleges and universities have changed their approach to LGBTQ students. When analyzing data collected in 2013, I found that nearly one-third of all Christian colleges and universities had adopted bans on so-called “homosexual acts” or “homosexual behavior” in their student handbooks. Yet, when reviewing Christian colleges and universities’ handbooks again over the past year, I found that under one-fourth of Christian colleges and universities had such discriminatory bans.

Why are some Christian colleges and universities becoming more accommodating—and even welcoming—to LGBTQ students?

There are several major reasons, but one of the most important is that several Christian denominations already embrace their LGBTQ members. Denominations such as the Episcopal Church, United Church of Christ, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Disciples of Christ, and Presbyterian Church USA, for example, allow ministers to officiate same-sex weddings. An increasing number of nondenominational churches also affirm LGBTQ people. Those Christian colleges and universities that are already associated with affirming denominations are certainly among the most likely to affirm their LGBTQ students.

Another reason that many Christian colleges and universities are becoming welcoming toward LGBTQ students is that they do not necessarily believe their primary mission is to hold all students to the specific religious tenets of their associated denomination. Rather, they see their primary mission as providing an important service (education) to the broader society. Just as Christian hospitals do not refuse to provide medical treatment to people who are not members of their associated denominations, many Christian colleges and universities have chosen not to deny people an education simply because certain people are not members of their associated denominations.

A rising number of Christian colleges and universities also recognize the harms that occur when people are discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. A recent survey by Religious Exemption Accountability Project shows that 12% of all Christian college and university students self-identify as LGBTQ. Because studies show that LGBTQ people in non-affirming Christian colleges and universities report greater rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, many Christian schools understand they would be harming a significant number of their students if they continued to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

And still other schools are simply concerned with their bottom lines. The United States is projected to go over a “demographic cliff” in 2025, at which time the number of 18-year-olds nationwide will drop dramatically. Some reports say that one-third of all private colleges and universities nationwide will face major financial crises over the next decade, causing them to close or pursue mergers. Many Christian colleges and universities recognize that adopting discriminatory policies toward LGBTQ students would alienate significant portions of their potential student body.

Certainly, despite these encouraging trends, those who are committed to LGBTQ rights should not be complacent. Many schools have still been slow to extend nondiscrimination protections and housing accommodations to trans students. And the Religious Exemption Accountability Project estimates that as many as 100,000 LGBTQ students are currently enrolled at Christian colleges and universities that still refuse to affirm the dignity and rights of LGBTQ people. That organization recently filed a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Education, challenging the federal government’s policy of providing loans even to Christian colleges and universities that otherwise violate Title IX protections for LGBTQ students.

It is likely the case that some Christian colleges and universities will not change their policies toward LGBTQ rights unless they are legally required to do so. Still, at Christian colleges and universities across the United States, LGBTQ students are not waiting around. LGBTQ students are actively mobilizing to bring about inclusive policies at their schools, and at a surprising number of schools, they are succeeding.

Jonathan S. Coley is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University and a Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute.

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Her status as a professional athlete and public figure brought significant media attention to her case, illustrating how sports, gender, and politics intersect in the treatment of high-profile individuals in international disputes.

Title:

Content: The open letter to President Biden, written by hand and released on the Fourth of July, tore at the heart. This is the unfortunate plight of Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner, wrongfully detained for 143 days and counting in a godforsaken gulag 6,000 miles from home.

“As I sit here in a Russian prison,” Griner wrote, “alone with my thoughts and without the protection of my wife, family, friends, Olympic jersey, or any accomplishments, I’m terrified I might be here forever.” She went on to beseech Biden: “I realize you are dealing with so much, but please don’t forget about me and the other American Detainees. Please do all you can to bring us home.”

We have been told by the White House press secretary that Biden has read the letter. We also have been told his Administration will “use every tool we possibly can” to bring Griner home. I hope so, because Russian news reports have said Griner, arrested on Feb. 17th, faces up to 10 years in prison for allegedly having .702 grams of hash oil in two vape cartridges in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to drug charges on July 7.

Biden and the U.S. State Department should use every tool in America’s toolbox to secure Griner’s release – exactly as he should on behalf of the more than 60 Americans currently held hostage in foreign countries.

Like Paul Whelan, a former Marine wrongfully detained in Russia since 2018. Like “the Citgo 6,” petroleum executives wrongfully held in Venezuela since 2017. And like Alina Lopez-Miyares, wrongfully locked up in a Cuban prison since January 2017.

In a more just world, we would care about all these Americans with the same vigor and at the same loud volume. The truth? As a culture, we have a limited attention span, a finite amount of compassion we spend in dollops – a sprinkling for the homeless here, a few spoonsful for the struggling poor there, and a drip or two for Brittney Griner.

Is that right? I don’t think so. I wish

we had an endless reserve of compassion, enough to go around in the right proportions.

Even so, I disagree wholeheartedly with Mercury head coach Vanessa Nygaard, who took dead aim at America in comments supporting Griner last week.

“If it was LeBron, he’d be home, right?” Nygaard declared. “It’s a statement about the value of women. It’s a statement about the value of a black person. It’s a statement about the value of a gay person. All of those. We know it.”

Actually, it’s a statement about how little we pay attention to wrongful detainees and their suffering. Virtually no one save the families of the imprisoned has made a peep about wrongfully imprisoned Americans anywhere, about Whelan, the Citgo 6, or Lopez-Miyares. This silence has nothing to do with race, gender, or who someone loves. It has everything to do with our culture’s capacity to empathize.

Nygaard seems to think if Griner was male, white and straight, America would be threatening nuclear war. Reality says otherwise. Nygaard is correct about one thing, though. If Lebron James was wrongfully imprisoned, Americans would be rioting in the streets.

That has everything to do with celebrity, which is the only reason you have heard about Brittney Griner’s case at all. If Griner couldn’t dribble, couldn’t dunk, wasn’t a six-time WBNA All-Star, her imprisonment would be occurring in silence.

Nygaard is dead wrong about for whom we care and why. We reserve the greatest compassion for the most famous among us – that is a perverted truth about the American way.

I hope Brittney Griner comes home soon. And I hope we bring every other wrongfully detained American home with her.

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Griner’s celebrity status amplified calls for her release, with figures across sports, politics, and advocacy groups rallying for her freedom, demonstrating how public figures can become symbols in geopolitical conflicts.

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Content: LOOK: Brittney Griner’s ‘Fight For Freedom’ Featured on the Cover of TIME Magazine

by Bryan Fyalkowski

Brittney Griner is on the cover of this week’s issue of TIME Magazine, along with a feature story by senior editor Sean Gregory. Griner joins MLB superstar Shohei Ohtani as the only athletes to be on the TIME cover so far in 2022. Other celebrities who TIME has featured on its cover this year include Zendaya and Elon Musk.

TIME Magazine has been published since 1923 and has over 20 million subscribers worldwide.

Multimedia artist Lorna Simpson designed the cover itself. It features Griner’s portrait along with the words “BRITTNEY GRINER AND THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM.” The photo of Griner in her WNBA uniform was taken by Stephen Gosling. It features “a celestial overlay of meteor showers—taken from a 19th-century print—that extends into the background.”

“The strong impression of this image of Griner is not only what could be interpreted as the solemnity of her expression. But also the symmetry of the star tattoos on her shoulders,” Simpson explained. “The inversion of the illustration is a way of bringing into focus how much of her life has been upended. Also the urgency of her release and safe return to the U.S., and the preciousness of time passing.”

Gregory’s story, meanwhile, is titled “Brittney Griner’s Fight for Freedom.” It is essentially a rundown of her entire Russian imprisonment situation, along with an overview of her life and career up to that point.

After more than five months of Brittney Griner in captivity, the U.S. is reportedly willing to send Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in exchange for her and Paul Whelan. Griner has been imprisoned since February 17, while Whelan has been behind bars in Russia since 2018.

But at this point in time, Russia has not agreed to the deal. According to Reuters, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday: “So far there are no agreements in this area.”

Foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova confirmed that talks have occurred, but nothing further at the moment.

Griner’s lawyer in Russia, Maria Blagovolina, mentioned that her trial would have to come to a close before any exchange is made.

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Her detention was part of a broader pattern of wrongful detentions by authoritarian governments, which use high-profile individuals like Griner to gain leverage in diplomatic disputes, as evidenced by Russia’s interest in exchanging her for Viktor Bout, a notorious arms dealer convicted in the U.S.

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Brittney Griner Involved In Possible Prisoner Swap With Russia

In an effort to free Brittney Griner, the pro basketball star detained in Russia, the Biden administration has offered to swap her for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout and send him back to Russia, Forbes has learned. Negotiations are in the early stages, according to a non-government source in a position to know.

Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and six-time WNBA all-star who also plays professionally in Russia, was arrested in Moscow Feb. 17 after customs police claimed they found vape cartridges with hash oil in her luggage. Bout, the so-called “Merchant of Death,” inspired Nicolas Cage’s gunrunner character in the 2005 film, “Lord of War.” He’s serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison since his 2011 conviction in New York federal court of conspiring to sell millions of dollars in weapons to FARC, the Colombian terror group.

The possibility of a Griner-Bout trade was reported on May 13 by Tass, Russia’s state-owned news agency, and confirmed for Forbes by the source. “Currently, talks are underway on exchanging Bout for Griner,” Tass reported, citing “a source in the Public Monitoring Commission.” A second Moscow-based news outlet, Gazeta.Ru, had earlier reported a Griner-Bout exchange was in the works.

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department declined to comment. Roger Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, who leads the interagency team that’s working for Griner’s release, had no comment. The same was true for Bout’s New York attorney, Steve Zissou. Lindsay Kagawa Colas, Griner’s California agent, did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the anti-Russian fervor in Washington sparked by President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine, the White House a month ago struck a deal to free Trevor Reed, a former Marine who had been held in a Russian prison for two years for allegedly attacking a Moscow police officer. In exchange, President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Konstantin Yaroshenko, who was serving 20 years for conspiring to import $100 million in cocaine.

Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who’d been instrumental in Reed’s release, is also working on behalf of Griner’s family at their request, according to Mickey Bergman, vice president of the Richardson Center. He’s also working for the release of Paul Whelan, a former Marine detained in Moscow since 2018 on espionage charges. “The situation (as you might imagine) is sensitive,” Bergman said, declining to comment further.

Bout was a translator in the Soviet army before starting an air-freight company that transported tens of millions of arms he supplied during his heyday in the 1990s and early 2000s to sanctioned militias and rebels in conflicts throughout Africa and Asia. Soft-spoken, erudite, fluent in seven languages with an IQ of 170, Bout seemed more like a university professor than the world’s most notorious illegal arms trafficker. His 2008 arrest in Bangkok was part of a sting operation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

The U.S. government opposes the practice of wrongful detention as a bargaining chip because it represents a threat to the safety of everyone traveling, working and living abroad, a State Department official told Forbes. That disdain, however, didn’t stop the department from helping arrange the release of Reed and others.

Griner, 31, is by far the most high profile of the more than a dozen Americans detained by Russia in the last decade. That puts more pressure on the State Department, which is acutely aware that as a Black lesbian, Griner could be a target of Putin’s exclusionary politics. Since the maximum base salary in the WNBA is $228,094 — male stars can earn as much as Steph Curry’s $45 million annually — Griner and many other American women play during the WNBA off-season in Russia, where they can bring home more than $1 million. Griner has played several years for the team in Ekaterinburg.

Griner’s U.S. supporters were at first mostly silent over her plight. The government convinced them that Russia might deport her quickly only if her case did not become front-page news. Once it became clear that Russia planned to hold her, the State Department changed her status to “wrongfully detained,” opening the door to swap negotiations. Briner’s U.S. supporters have spoken out forcefully against her imprisonment.

One lingering question is whether a deal to swap Bout for Griner will get Biden’s approval. Given the president’s declaration that Putin is a “war criminal,” some on Griner’s team worry he might hesitate before freeing an infamous Russian arms trafficker.

“There’s a problem with releasing a convicted arms trafficker for Griner, whose drug possession would probably only be a fine in the U.S.,” says Shira Scheindlin, the retired federal judge who presided over the Bout trial and was required to sentence him to the 25-year mandatory minimum. “It would be better if Bout – who has already served too much time in my opinion – was exchanged for both Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan. Then there would be some moral equivalency about which few could complain.”

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Brittney Griner’s release was ultimately secured through a high-profile prisoner swap in December 2022, in which the United States exchanged her for Viktor Bout after months of negotiations.

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Inside Joe Biden’s Faustian pact with Russia to secure Brittney

Three weeks ago, the American basketball star Brittney Griner arrived at a Russian penal colony known for torture, beatings and slave labour to begin a nine-year sentence following her arrest at a Moscow airport in February for possession of vaping cartridges containing hashish oil.

But in a stunning twist on Thursday, Griner’s plight as an unwitting pawn in a high-stakes geopolitical struggle came to an abrupt end, as she arrived in Abu Dhabi from Moscow and boarded a plane home to reunite with her family. She landed in San Antonio, Texas, early Friday morning.

In exchange for Griner’s release, the US released Viktor Bout, a notorious arms trafficker who was serving a 25-year sentence for conspiring to kill US citizens and aiding a terrorist organisation.

The deal was met with jubilation from Griner’s family and supporters. But the controversial swap for Bout — as well as the exclusion of Paul Whelan, another US citizen imprisoned in Russia — also drew criticism and raised questions about how America’s adversaries might leverage arrests of its citizens in the future.

US officials began working toward Griner’s release as soon as she was apprehended in Russia in February, but the effort became more concentrated on prisoner swap negotiations once the State Department declared in May that she had been wrongfully detained.

In July, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on the phone for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February. During the call, Blinken pressed Lavrov to accept a “substantial proposal” from Washington to release Griner and the former marine Whelan, who has been detained in Russia since 2018 on what the US and his family say are trumped-up espionage charges.

Americans had offered to free Bout, people familiar with the discussions said, but the Russians said they also wanted the release of Vadim Krasikov, a former colonel from Russia’s domestic spy agency who was convicted of murder in Germany last year.

In the ensuing months, officials said, Washington made a number of offers to Russia in an attempt to secure the release of Griner and Whelan.

However, Biden administration officials said that in recent weeks it became clear that Moscow would only accept a one-for-one swap. According to one senior administration official, “the choice was bringing Brittney Griner home right now or bringing no Americans home from Russia right now”.

Despite the Biden administration’s insistence that they had no choice but to exclude Whelan from the deal, Republican lawmakers and others denounced the decision, as well as facilitating the release of Bout, who is also known as “the merchant of death”.

“The Biden administration has allowed Viktor Bout, a dangerous arms dealer who was convicted of conspiring to kill American law enforcement, to walk free,” said Mike Rogers, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.

“This move to appease Vladimir Putin will only encourage further hostage taking by Russian security forces,” he added.

US officials described Biden’s choice as a painful one, adding that they would continue to work for Whelan’s release. Washington previously secured the release of Trevor Reed, another former marine, via a prisoner swap in April.

People familiar with Thursday’s prisoner exchange likened the episode to “a scene from the Cold War”, with Russian and American planes meeting on the tarmac at an airport in Abu Dhabi.

The Russian plane carrying Griner arrived first, one of the people said. American officials and people familiar with the events said the basketball star was upbeat on the tarmac, saying she was looking forward to returning home.

The Griner-Bout swap marks a rare instance in which the US and Russia have been able to find common ground since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, sending the west’s relationship with Moscow to its lowest ebb since the Cuban missile crisis.

According to people familiar with the matter, the Americans and Russians directly negotiated the details of the swaps, with UAE officials including president Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan helping to facilitate the mechanics of the transfer.

It is not unusual for third countries to aid in brokering international diplomatic agreements such as prisoner swaps between hostile countries.

Sheikh Mohammed and Putin discussed the matter when they met in Russia in October, and they spoke on the phone on Wednesday, people familiar with the meetings said. Yousef al-Otaiba, UAE ambassador to the US, was present for the exchange on Thursday and had helped to co-ordinate details on the American side.

On Thursday, some pro-Kremlin commentators hailed the swap as a return to diplomacy. “Everyone sees through this exchange that Moscow and Washington are holding secret negotiations and can make a deal,” Sergei Markov, a political scientist and former member of Russia’s parliament, wrote on Telegram. “And everyone hopes that means Moscow and Washington can make a deal to end the war in Ukraine.”

However, analysts and US officials said that while the breakthrough was a sign that the two sides could get things done when their interests align, it was not evidence of any larger thaw in relations. Biden administration officials added that the recent conversations with Russia about Griner and other prisoners were limited to the release of wrongfully detained Americans.

“The exchange doesn’t do anything to change the situation for bilateral relations. There are lots of issues where they are in open confrontation,” said Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

He said the otherwise dire state of relations between Russia and the west was thrown into sharp relief last week, when Moscow abruptly pulled out of talks on renewing the New Start treaty, the only remaining agreement governing the countries’ nuclear arsenals.

“This is a global stability issue: the last remainders of arms control are falling apart, which could lead to an arms race and a higher risk of dangerous incidents,” he said. “The trajectory we’re on is making that all the more likely.”

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Key events in the negotiations included a July phone call between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, during which Blinken proposed a substantial offer to release both Griner and Paul Whelan, though Russia insisted on a one-for-one swap involving only Griner and Bout.

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Content: U.S. made 'substantial' offer for Brittney Griner prisoner swap with Russia, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says
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U.S. made 'substantial' offer for Brittney Griner prisoner swap with Russia

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that the United States made a "substantial" proposal to Russia to bring home wrongfully detained WNBA star Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, who is also serving a prison sentence in Russia.

CNN reported that the U.S. offered Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer nicknamed "The Merchant of Death," for the prisoner swap. A prisoner swap freed former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed from a Russian penal colony in April.

Blinken added he would engage with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. It was the first public acknowledgement of a deal that could involve a prisoner swap or addressing the sanctions placed on the country after it invaded Ukraine.

“My hope would be that in speaking to Foreign Minister Lavrov, I can advance the efforts to bring them home,” Blinken said.

Blinken said President Joe Biden has been directly involved in the negotiations and he signed off on the offer to Moscow.

The president “signs off on any proposal that we make, certainly when it comes to Americans who are being arbitrarily detained abroad, including in this specific case,” Blinken said.

He said the U.S. agreement to free American Trevor Reed shows that Biden "is prepared to make tough decisions if it means the safe return of Americans."

Blinken added: "There is utility in sending clear, direct messages to the Russians on key priorities for us. These include the return of Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan, and following through on the grain agreement."

Griner appeared in court Wednesday for the sixth time since her trial began July 1. She has been detained on drug charges for carrying vape cartridges containing marijuana while traveling to the country on Feb. 17. Her detention in Russia, regardless of a verdict, has been authorized until Dec. 20. Whelan has been in custody since 2018 and is serving a 16-year sentence on espionage charges the U.S. disputes.

Bout was handed a 25-year sentence in 2012 for conspiring to sell weapons to people who planned to kill Americans.

“He’s a bad dude,” Rob Saale, a former hostage negotiator with the FBI, told USA TODAY Sports.

Any deal involving him would involve multiple U.S. prisoners, Saale said. Blinken wouldn't comment on the Russian response to the offer, although CNN reported it was floated last month.

"I'm not going to characterize it," Blinken said. "My interest and my focus is that to the best of my ability, we get the yes.

"This is something that we are focused on 24/7."

The WNBA and Players' Association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Contributing: Lindsay Schnell; Associated Press

Follow Chris Bumbaca on Twitter @BOOMbaca.

The final exchange took place in Abu Dhabi, facilitated by UAE officials, marking a rare moment of cooperation between the U.S. and Russia amidst strained relations due to the Ukraine conflict.

Griner’s experience in the Russian penal colony was marked by harsh conditions, including limited access to basic amenities such as hot water and adequate medical care, with former inmates likening such facilities to legal slavery systems involving overcrowding and forced labor.

Title:

Content: Diplomat Sparks Renewed Hope For Brittney Griner Prisoner Exchange

The situation surrounding Brittney Griner's case is looking a little less bleak, thanks to the recent developments brought about by negotiations between the U.S. and Russia.

In early November, the WNBA star had been transferred to a penal colony in the Russian republic of Mordovia. There, she began fulfilling her nine-year sentence for drug possession. As reported by Reuters, authorities initially arrested Griner in February 2022 after vape cartridges containing cannabis oil were discovered in her luggage at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. While she attempted to appeal the ruling, it was ultimately upheld by a Russian court.

"This has been [a] very traumatic experience, waiting for this day, waiting for the first court, and getting nine years for a crime that I was barely over the significant amount," she said at the hearing (via CBS News). "I don't understand the first court's decision to give one year less than the max when I've been here almost 8 months, and people with more severe crimes have gotten less than what I was given... I really hope that the court will adjust this sentence, because it's been very, very stressful and very traumatic to my mental and psyche, being away from my family and not being able to communicate." However, there is now renewed hope that Griner could be released, with a Russian diplomat claiming that a swap could happen sometime in the future.

Russian diplomat says there's 'always a chance' for a swap

Not all hope is lost, after all. According to Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, Russia is not turning its back on the possibility of a prisoner exchange with the U.S. As reported by the New York Post, Ryabkov told reporters that there is "always a chance" when asked about the likelihood of a swap taking place before the end of the year. However, he noted that in the past, there had been multiple instances when it seemed as if Russia would agree to a swap, only for the plan to fall apart. If the prisoner swap does take place, Ryabkov said it would "send a positive signal that not everything is hopeless in Russian-American relations."

In the meantime, it looks like Brittney Griner has her work cut out for her. Maria Alyokhina, a former member of the band Pussy Riot, didn't mince words when she spoke to NPR about her own experience at a Russian penal colony. "It has a bit better conditions than [the] original gulag system from the 1950s," she said, but added that it's still "a labor camp." She described the grim reality she endured while serving out her own sentence, calling it inhumane. "For 100 women, there are like three toilets and no hot water," she recalled, adding that the penal colony is merely a "legal slavery system."

According to a statement released by her lawyers (via BBC), she is trying her best to survive and is "doing as well as could be expected and trying to stay strong as she adapts to a new environment."

She faced additional challenges due to her inability to speak Russian, which hindered her ability to understand the laws and protect herself, while witnessing the physical toll and deaths of other inmates added to the psychological strain of her imprisonment.

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Content: Former prisoner in Russian punishment colony reveals to CNN what American Grainer can expect after 9 years in prison
The world.
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Nadezhda Tolokonikova, from the group "Female Riot", spent nearly two years in a penal colony after demonstrating against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Tolokonikova explained what American basketball player Britney Grainer could expect after she was sentenced to nine years in prison for drug trafficking and shared the harsh conditions that occur in the Russian penal colonies.
Tolokonikova said she believed it would be “particularly difficult for Britney because she doesn ’ t know Russian, she can ’ t learn the law she has to abide by in the penal colony, and she can ’ t protect herself. ”
“The worst thing about a penal colony is watching the death of others around you and not being able to do anything.
People die from hard physical work and not being able to get the medical treatment they need.
But you're just another prisoner.
You can't do anything about it.
You just have to witness this cruelty and know that something like this can happen to you as well. ”
Tolokonikova revealed the motivation that kept her alive, saying: "The most important thing now is to minimize the trauma that she will endure during this time period.
Thinking about your loved ones who are waiting for you and who need you, don ’ t give up on your life.
Things like finding a beautiful flower and thinking that this beautiful flower was able to grow in these terrible and terrifying conditions in this nightmarish world prompted me to stay alive and not lose faith that there would be life outside the punitive colony. ”
Tolokonikova concluded: “I hope Britney will come home as soon as possible and experience as little trauma as possible in her condition.
I ’ m really looking forward to reuniting her with her family. ”

In her final weeks in the penal colony, Griner cut her trademark dreadlocks to prevent them from freezing in the cold conditions, a decision that underscored the severe discomfort she endured during her incarceration.

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Content: When she finally returned home following a hellish prison stint in Russia, Brittney Griner’s trademark dreadlocks were gone. She looked like a different person without it, and more than a few folks were curious about the timing of her decision to cut it.

As it turns out, it had a lot to do with Griner’s survival instincts while inside the Russian penitentiary. The WNBA star did not cut her hair just because she wanted a new look, but apparently, the decision was made out of necessity.

Brittney’s Russian attorney, Maria Blagovolina, revealed that according to Griner herself, she cut out her dreads two weeks prior to her release because she feared that they would freeze during the long Russian winter:

“It’s very cold in there and every time she washed her hair she got cold and would get a chill,” Blagovolina said, via T.J. Quin of ESPN. “She should have waited until New Year’s Day.”

That’s actually very telling of Griner’s mindset in her final few weeks in prison. She did not know that her prison term was coming to an end and she was already preparing for the worst. This just goes to show how difficult life was for the Phoenix Mercury center inside the Russian penal colony. It’s also as if she had abandoned all hope that she was going to get out soon.

Fortunately, the U.S. government delivered on its promise to get Brittney Griner back before the New Year. It was a long and difficult process, no doubt, but the most important thing right now is that Brittney is finally home.

Her identity as a Black, queer, female athlete amplified the complexity of her detention in Russia, as she became a potent cultural symbol in a country known for its hostility toward LGBTQ+ individuals and racial minorities.

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Content: games

Why Isn’t Brittney Griner the Biggest Sports Story in the Country?

Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

The second-best player in every sport is a superstar at a level that 99.999 percent of professional athletes — who are already the elite of the elite of the elite — will never come close to achieving. Joel Embiid finished second in NBA MVP voting last year; in baseball (a sport once actively played in this country), it was Vladimir Guerrero Jr.; and in football, it was Tom Brady.

In the WNBA, the Phoenix Mercury’s Brittney Griner earned this distinction last year. She was second in scoring, sixth in rebounds, first in blocks (she’s on track to become the WNBA’s all-time leader in that category), and, according to most advanced metrics, the best offensive player in the league. Her résumé is glittering: She won an NCAA national championship for Baylor in 2012, the same year she captured college basketball’s Player of the Year Award. She then won a WNBA championship in 2014 and was selected as one of the best 25 players in league history in 2021. She has two Olympic gold medals to her name. In the gold-medal game against Japan in Tokyo last summer, she dominated, scoring 30 points to clinch an easy victory. She is the apex of her sport. She is the best of the best. She is a legend.

And for more than a month now, she has been in the custody of the Russian government. Yet until Russian officials released a statement over the weekend saying they had detained Griner after finding hashish oil in her airport bag, it seemed that nobody had noticed. And the reaction since the arrest has been stunningly quiet. One of the greatest athletes in American sports — a gold-medal winner, a superstar, a champion — was arrested in a dangerous and volatile country that has suddenly become a pariah on the world stage. Making equivalences between sports only takes you so far here, but seriously: Imagine if Tom Brady were being held by Russian officials right now.

It is unclear how directly Griner’s plight connects to the catastrophic Russian invasion of Ukraine, and her detention has been overshadowed by the death and destruction wrought by Putin. And part of the muted response is likely due to sensitivity of the negotiations between Russian and American officials. Griner’s wife asked for privacy on Instagram, and it’s clear the precariousness of the situation has led to a certain institutional resistance to even mentioning it: That WNBA.com doesn’t include a single story about one of the organization’s best players being detained speaks to this dynamic. It is also worth remembering, as ESPN’s T.J. Quinn did on Monday, that Griner, whatever the specifics, is likely in some danger; Quinn noted that “as a 6-9 Black gay American woman, she’s a powerful cultural symbol,” and “even in the best case, she’s in for a long legal slog in the Russian criminal justice system. And there’s little the US govt can do about it.”

Another motive the WNBA may have for staying quiet is its own culpability in the situation. The reason Griner was in Russia in the first place — to play off-season basketball, as she has done there for years — is that the league does not pay its superstars the way other sports leagues do. As Tom Ley from Defector pointed out:

The league’s low salaries and minimal efforts towards player support have for years forced even its biggest stars to treat their time in the WNBA as a part-time job. The maximum WNBA salary in 2022 was just over $228,000, and players can make far more than that playing in leagues overseas. In 2015, Diana Taurasi was paid $1.5 million to skip the WNBA season entirely and play for UMMC Ekaterinburg, and Liz Cambage recently revealed that she has made “five to eight times” as much money playing overseas than she has in the WNBA.

Before you say, “Well, the WNBA isn’t as popular in the NBA; of course Griner wouldn’t make as much as LeBron,” remember this: The WNBA has a salary cap, and one that’s particularly suppressive of superstar wages. Griner only made $221,450 for the 2021–2022 season, which is less than a third of the minimum salary in the NHL, but nevertheless classifies her as the fourth-highest-paid player in the WNBA. A new CBA signed two years ago was supposed to address these issues, yet there was Griner, making a mint playing for UMMC Ekaterinburg in Russia. The WNBA’s MVP last year, Connecticut Sun forward Jonquel Jones, plays for the same Russian team. She got out of the country just after the invasion of Ukraine began.

Liz Cambage, a star for the Los Angeles Sparks, has noted that players can make “five to eight times more money” for Russian teams than they do in the WNBA, despite the league being by far the most high-profile women’s basketball league in the world. And restricted cash flow isn’t the only problem for players: Just last week, the league fined the New York Liberty $500,000 for chartering flights to games, claiming this gave the Liberty a “competitive advantage.” (For perspective, almost every team in the collegiate NCAA tournament next week will arrive at their destinations via chartered flight.) Griner didn’t choose to go play in Russia. The league left her no choice.

The precarity of Griner’s position in Russia may give the WNBA a good reason to stay quiet about her case. But perhaps the league would also prefer not to dwell on how she ended up in this situation in the first place.

In any case, it’s not just the WNBA downplaying this story. There was also no mention of Griner on the front pages of ESPN.com, CBS Sports, and SI.com just 48 hours after news of her arrest landed.

This strange reaction comes at a time when the WNBA has surged in popularity. Last year’s finals, featuring Griner’s Mercury, put up the highest ratings ever, a full 49 percent jump from 2020. This is partly because of the league’s activism, which has increased its visibility in a dramatic way. And Griner has been right in the middle of it all, wearing Breonna Taylor’s name on her jersey and speaking out in favor of LGBTQ+ issues since before she even entered the NBA. She was also the first openly gay athlete ever signed to an endorsement deal with Nike. Her teammate Diana Taurasi, perhaps the best player in WNBA history, called Griner “a pioneer.”

And still, relative silence.

As Griner sits in detention in Russia, as a result of a system that is set up to devalue her and other stars at every corner, it would be nice if her plight received attention commensurate with its seriousness.

Why Isn’t Brittney Griner the Biggest Sports Story?

The muted initial response to Griner’s detention highlighted systemic biases, with commentators suggesting that her race, sexual orientation, and gender contributed to the lack of widespread public and media attention compared to a high-profile male or white athlete in a similar situation.

Griner’s release was celebrated as a victory for marginalized communities, with LGBTQ+ advocates emphasizing the significance of her identity in rallying diverse groups to demand her freedom.

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Donald Trump Jr goes on vile rant attacking Brittney Griner after Russia release

Donald Trump Jr – son of the former President – has lashed out at WBNA star Brittney Griner, following her release from a Russian penal colony this week.

While many people shared their joy at her freedom, Trump Jr instead criticised the release and attacked her sporting skills.

He also made a string of jabs at President Joe Biden, who announced Griner’s release on Thursday (8 December), which was made in exchange for Russian criminal Viktor Bout, who was being held in the United States.

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Trump Jr referred to Griner as “an awful America hating WNBA player”, and in a series of tweets, attacked both President Biden’s negotiations for the queer WNBA star and Griner’s general allegiance to the nation.

Her release was celebrated by friends, teammates and celebrities.

Griner’s release drew much wider celebration on Thursday when Biden announced she was free and on her way back to the US, ending nearly 10 months of detainment in Russia on drug charges.

Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony in August for possession of a small amount of cannabis oil.

Where Trump Jr railed against Griner’s release, the voices of the LGBTQ+ community rang loudly.

“Britney Griner’s long awaited release is a relief for her wife, teammates, fans and all in the LGBTQ+ community who recognized the extreme danger she faced as an out gay Black woman detained in Putin’s Russia,” GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement.

“Britney’s wife Cherelle never gave up fighting for her safe return, and president Biden and the State Department never wavered in their commitment to the Griners and the LGBTQ+ community on Britney’s behalf. We can’t wait to welcome Britney home.”

Activists on Twitter were quick to point out the efforts of Black queer feminists toward Griner’s release, hoping voices from the grassroots are not drowned out by diplomacy.

Griner’s release was most poignantly celebrated by her wife Cherelle, who, speaking in the Oval Office, expressed gratitude and overwhelm for the reunion of her family.

“So over the last nine months, you all have been so privy to one of the darkest moments of my life, and so today I’m just standing here overwhelmed with emotions, but the most important emotion that I have right now is just sincere gratitude for president Biden and his entire administration,” she said.

Griner landed in the US on Friday (9 December) at a Texas airbase.

How did this story make you feel?

The sports community initially reacted with muted concern due to the precariousness of her situation, but later organized rallies and public calls for her release, highlighting her contributions to the sport and her role as a trailblazer for LGBTQ+ athletes.

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Content: The problem is not just what happened to Brittney Griner. The problem is that we don’t know what is happening to Brittney Griner now. The WNBA superstar was allegedly caught with hashish oil in her luggage at a Russian airport and has been in custody for several weeks. For those first couple of weeks, it was as if no one noticed she was missing, no small feat for an athlete who is six foot nine and one of the most recognizable players in the history of the game. She also is also well-known in Russia, where she plays for UMMC Ekaterinburg in the WNBA off season. In 2021 she helped the Russian team win its fifth EuroLeague Women’s championship. (Many WNBA players hoop in Russia during the off-season, as they need to supplement their income, an injustice in and of itself.)

Almost certainly, instead of creating an immediate public outcry following her arrest, there were efforts behind the scenes to get her out of Russia, which, we know now, was preparing to invade Ukraine. The goal would have been to make this go away without provoking an international incident. Well, it’s too late for that now. There are online petitions and a predictable uproar given the anti-Putin sentiment in the States. Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, posted a picture of them together on Instagram as the news spread over the weekend. She thanked their fans and then wrote, “I understand that many of you have grown to love BG over the years and have concerns and want details. Please honor our privacy as we continue to work on getting my wife home safely.”

In other words, delicate negotiations to get Griner home are almost certainly ongoing in a situation that is spiraling. Griner is detained in Russia at a moment when US-Russian relations are at their worst since Ronald Reagan joked, “We begin bombing in five minutes.” When and how she gets home and how she is being treated right now are anyone’s guess. As basketball writer Tom Ziller put it, “We don’t have an idea as the public WNBA fandom where Griner is, or how she is doing, or how long she has been detained, or the circumstances of her custody, or what she knows about a timeline for being released, or what she’s being told. We don’t really know anything, and we don’t know whether she or those close to her know anything.”

Whether it started this way or not, we need to understand Griner as a political prisoner. It may have started with airport racial profiling and the idiotic war on cannabis. But now, by the nature of this perilous moment, she has become a chit, a leverage point, in a larger political war.

The WNBA and Griner’s team, the Phoenix Mercury, are being tight-lipped about the situation—as is the US State Department. But I did reach the coauthor of Griner’s 2014 memoir In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court, Sue Hovey. The former ESPN The Magazine executive editor told me: “Brittney Griner is one of the most resilient, mentally tough athletes I’ve ever met. When she led Baylor to a perfect season and the national championship in 2012, she did so while having to endure a torrent of vicious verbal attacks from opposing fans and online trolls. People forget that when she graduated from Baylor in 2013 and publicly came out as gay upon entering the WNBA, that was still a big deal at the time; it wasn’t nearly as common as it is today for athletes to reveal their authentic selves. Brittney was, and continues to be, a trailblazer in eschewing gender norms. Even eight years after her memoir was published, I still get the occasional Twitter message from a college student who read her book in a gender studies class, or just a fan expressing gratitude for Brittney sharing her story. Like many athletes, she has had some stumbles and controversy along the way, but she always takes accountability and shows a willingness to learn and grow. And in an age of curated social media content, there’s something refreshing about a high-profile athlete who gives us that three-dimensional view. She’s relatable and human, and that resonates with people.”

It is absolutely true that Griner resonates with people, and now many of her fans are up in arms. If the goal was to quietly negotiate Griner’s return, those days are done. At this point, there is really no choice but to shine the brightest possible light on this political injustice and demand that she be sent home. Political prisoners are rarely freed easily. It requires—and demands—an international response. Brittney Griner is a basketball titan who deserves more than to be treated like a pawn.

Advocacy groups, including LGBTQ+ organizations like GLAAD, celebrated Griner’s release as a victory for marginalized communities, praising the Biden administration’s commitment to securing her freedom despite criticism over the prisoner swap.

Public rallies, such as the one held at the Footprint Center in Phoenix, brought together fans, teammates, and political leaders to celebrate Griner’s contributions and demand action from the U.S. government.

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Content: PHOENIX (AP) — They shared laughs, smiles, memories. There also were tears, fears, unease.

Through the range of emotions, one common thread bonded them together: Brittney Griner.

Wearing “BG” shirts and holding signs, several hundred fans gathered for a public rally in support of Griner on Wednesday, hoping their sentiments would reach the WNBA player 6,000 miles away in a Russian jail cell.

“It’s really painful and hard to watch, and it’s really taken a toll on a lot of us,” said Kelly Gedney of Surprise, Arizona. “We can feel the fear that she has. It’s scary to me that she’s in a cage when she is traveling to her court cases. She’s been wrongfully detained and we’re going to do everything we can to get her home.”

Griner has spent the past four months in a Russian prison and is currently on trial. She’s accused of possessing vape cartridges containing cannabis oil when she arrived at the Moscow airport while returning to play for her Russian team, facing a prison term of up to 10 years if convicted.

The WNBA and U.S. officials have worked to free Griner, without success. Griner was able to send a handwritten letter to President Joe Biden, saying she feared spending the rest of her life in prison while pushing the administration to not forget about other American detainees.

President Biden called Griner’s wife, Cherelle, on Wednesday to tell her that he is working to free her as soon as possible.

“One hundred thirty-nine days have passed since my wife has been able to speak to me, to our family and our friends,” Cherelle Griner said during the rally, stopping to compose herself several times. “I’m frustrated my wife is not going to get justice. I know you all are frustrated, too. That’s why you’re here.”

The rally at the Footprint Center, home of the Phoenix Mercury and Suns, was part celebration of Griner’s accomplishments on and off the court with a call to action.

The rally featured videos of Griner giving back to the community, dancers and a dramatic poem reading as many of Mercury teammates sat together in chairs on the right side of the court.

Phoenix Suns player Torey Craig spoke, as did Mercury player Brianna Turner.

“To know BG is to know such a kind spirit, a nice person, such a giver — I can go on and on about the type of person she is,” said Turner, who also was able to exchange letters with Griner. “We need to get her back home. She deserves to be home. She needs to be back with her family and friends. We are BG.”

Arizona Congressman Greg Stanton, the former Phoenix mayor, also was on hand after pushing a resolution calling for Griner’s immediate release passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this week.

“Today was important, a show of unity, speaking in one voice that we expect our president, our administration to do what it takes to bring our fellow American back home,” Stanton said.

___

To see more AP stories on Griner: https://apnews.com/hub/brittney-griner

International organizations and human rights groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, urged the U.S. government to negotiate Griner’s freedom, highlighting her wrongful detention as a political pawn by Russia.

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U.S. basketball star detained in Russia for months, Blinken speaks to family
2022 / 6 / 23 15: 49
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. basketball star Brittney Griner has been detained in Russia for months, and a coalition of human rights groups today urged President Joe Biden and Russia to "reach an agreement" to secure her release, and Secretary of State Colin Blinken also spoke to Griner's wife today.
WNBA player Griner, who won two Olympic gold medals for the United States, was detained at a Moscow airport on February 17 after being charged with carrying several e-cigarette boxes containing cannabis oil in his luggage. The maximum sentence is 10 years in prison.
A Russian court last week extended her pre-trial detention to July 2.
Senior State Department officials said Antony Blinken spoke with Greiner ’ s same-sex wife, Cherelle Griner, this evening, but did not disclose details.
The State Department said yesterday that Mr. Greiner had not been able to speak to his wife as scheduled over the weekend because of logistical problems exacerbated by Russia ’ s restrictions on the U.S. Embassy ’ s operations in Moscow.
Forty advocacy groups, including the National Organization for Women, the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Defamation League (GLAAD), have praised the Biden administration ’ s efforts, including in May when it said the 31-year-old Greiner had been “wrongly detained ” and assigned diplomats to handle his release.
But they say more needs to be done.
Reuters reviewed the groups ’ letters to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, which read: “The U.S. government categorizes Britney as wrongfully detained and acknowledges that she is essentially a political pawn. ”
“While these are vital measures, we now urge you to reach an agreement so that Britney can return to the United States safely and immediately. ”
National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson told Reuters the government was looking at ways to secure Greiner ’ s release.
"President Biden has made it clear that it is necessary to see all U.S. nationals held as hostages or wrongfully detained abroad released, including Greiner," Watson said in an email.
“The United States Government continues to make vigorous efforts to try to bring her back using all available methods. ” (Translator: Lee Pei-shan / Authored by: Chan Cheng-yi) 1110623
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Diplomatic efforts were central to Griner’s case, as the U.S. State Department classified her as 'wrongfully detained,' enabling specialized government channels to negotiate her release.

Former U.S. diplomat Bill Richardson worked independently with Griner’s family and Russian officials to explore potential prisoner exchange deals, demonstrating the importance of non-governmental diplomatic initiatives in her case.

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Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to travel to Moscow for talks on freeing Brittney Griner: Source

Posted at 6:53 AM, Jul 10, 2022
and last updated 2022-07-10 09:53:42-04

Former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is planning to travel to Russia in the near future for talks aimed at finding a deal to free the detained WNBA star Brittney Griner, a source with knowledge of the proposed trip told ABC News.

Richardson, who also served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary in the Clinton administration, played a role in achieving a prisoner exchange in April that saw Russia release former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed after nearly two and a half years in captivity.

He is expected to go to Moscow in the next couple of weeks, according to the source, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Russia has repeatedly suggested it's interested in trading Griner for Russians held in U.S. prisons. The new trip appears aimed at seeing if a similar deal to the one that freed Reed could be produced for Griner.

Richardson’s office did not confirm the potential visit, telling ABC News “we are unable to comment on this at the moment.”

“What I can say (and is publicly known) is both the Whelan and Griner families have asked us to help with the release of their loved ones,” Mickey Bergman, executive director at the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, told ABC News in an email.

Richardson is currently representing the Griner family as well as the family of Paul Whelan, the other former Marine held by Russia for three and a half years.

Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in basketball, has been in detention in Russia since mid-February after she was stopped at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport and accused by Russian authorities of having vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage.

This week, Griner told a Moscow court she would like to plead guilty to the charges, saying she had brought the vape cartridges into Russia unintentionally, explaining she had not meant to leave them in her bag.

The Biden administration has classified Griner as “wrongfully detained” and American officials believe Russia seized her, like Whelan and Reed, to use as bargaining chips with the U.S.

Richardson’s possible trip comes amid speculation whether the U.S. would be willing to make another prisoner swap to free Griner. The Biden administration has said it is committed to negotiating with Russia for Griner’s release but it has refused to comment on whether it is considering any trade.

Asked to comment on Richardson's potential visit, the White House National Security Council told ABC it was in contact with Richardson and valued his efforts, but declined to say more.

“NSC leadership are in touch with Bill Richardson. We appreciate his commitment to getting Americans home and are pursuing the release of Brittney and Paul through government channels,” NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, said she had requested Richardson's team's help and would support a trip if it took place.

“We asked the Richardson Center to help and I’m encouraged that he might be going,” Cherelle Griner said in a statement to ABC through Griner’s agent Lindsay Colas.

Richardson has a long history of working to free Americans wrongfully detained overseas. Through his nonprofit, the Richardson Center, he has helped return U.S. citizens imprisoned in Iran and North Korea among others.

His team represented Trevor Reed’s family and spent months engaged in shuttle diplomacy trying to outline a possible deal to free him.

Richardson even flew to Moscow on the eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in a last ditch effort to persuade Russia to make a trade.

Richardson does not represent the White House. In Reed’s case, he approached Russia’s government and the Biden administration separately to try to feel out what both sides might accept as any possible deal. He then relayed what he had heard back to both sides.

In the end, the prisoner trade the White House made for Reed was the same one Richardson had been advocating for: releasing Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot serving a U.S. prison sentence for drug smuggling.

Richardson has since encouraged the Biden administration to consider making similar deals for Griner and Paul Whelan.

Following Griner’s court appearance on Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said it was "going to do everything that we can to bring home Brittney Griner safely, and to also make sure that we bring Paul Whelan back home as well." Jean-Pierre said Griner's guilty plea would have "no impact" on the efforts to negotiate her release.

Russian state media and officials have repeatedly floated trading Griner or Whelan for Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer, dubbed “the Merchant of Death” in the media and who is currently serving a 25 year sentence on narco-terrorism charges.

Trevor Reed and his family have called on the Biden administration to exchange Bout if it would free Whelan and Griner.

Speaking to ABC News this week, Reed urged President Joe Biden to do more.

"I hope that President Biden and his administration will do everything possible to get both, you know, Brittney and Paul out of Russia, and that they will do that immediately," he told ABC News. "Because every day that, you know, they sit here and wait to make a decision is one more day that, you know, Paul and Brittney are suffering."

Griner’s detention abruptly halted her professional basketball career, as she missed the entire 2022 WNBA season while serving her sentence in Russia.

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Content: ‘She brings light’: Brittney Griner’s triumphant return to the WNBA

Prior to being detained in a Russian prison for 294 days, Brittney Griner was on top of the world.

The 32-year-old was coming off one of the best WNBA seasons of her career. She was the Most Valuable Player runner-up, averaging 20.5 points and 9.5 rebounds for the Phoenix Mercury, who she led back to the WNBA finals for the first time since winning the title in 2014. Meanwhile, Griner was on her way to play for Russian club UMMC Ekaterinburg, who she had led to four EuroLeague titles since she started spending her WNBA off-seasons there in 2014.

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At the time of her arrest Griner was, according to the testimony of her Russian teammate Evgenia Belyakova, “the most beloved player in Russia.”

To become such a popular figure in both America and Russia is no easy task for a gay, Black woman. But Griner’s ascent was never easy. She was bullied relentlessly growing up, first for her size and later for her sexuality, becoming one of the first active athletes in professional North American sports to come out as gay, shortly after being drafted No 1 overall by the Mercury in 2013.

In her first game as a pro, the 6ft 9in Griner towered over her opponents, changing the perceptions of what a female basketball player was capable of when she set a WNBA record with two dunks in a game. Griner went on to win a WNBA title, two Olympic gold medals, and seven WNBA All-Star appearances, on pace to achieve a level of greatness few ever have in the women’s game, and being marketed accordingly.

In fact, Griner was the first openly gay athlete to be endorsed by Nike. And the WNBA used her at the center of its marketing, acknowledging that gay athletes and LGBTQ+ activists like Griner were good for business.

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So when it all came crashing down at a Moscow airport on 17 February 2022, when Griner was found with vape cartridges containing traces of hashish oil in her luggage, not only did her career come to a screeching halt, but the league that she had been bound to since 2013 lost some of its forward momentum, too. She was later sentenced to nine years in Russian prison.

As much as Griner tried to stay positive, and as much as the WNBA community tried to help, a cloud hung over the entire 2022 season – one that would not dissipate until Griner was released and returned to America.

“Last year, it felt as though we couldn’t play with joy … It felt bad for us to be happy or to celebrate things because the weight of BG’s wrongful detainment weighed over us,” says former Mercury head coach Vanessa Nygaard.

When the US negotiated a prisoner swap to secure Griner’s freedom last December, she almost immediately announced her intention to return to the WNBA in 2023, signing a one-year deal with the Mercury. But nobody knew what to expect from Griner, who had spent almost a year under arduous physical and mental conditions.

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But, against all odds, Griner appears to be back to her normal self, on and off the court.

Related: WNBA power lies with two superteams. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing

In her first WNBA game in 579 days, Griner had 18 points, six rebounds and four blocks in a loss to the Los Angeles Sparks. In her first home game a couple of days later, she hit just the seventh three-pointer of her career, yelling “I’m back!” to the crowd of 14,000 cheering fans.

“I appreciate everything a little more,” Griner said about being back in the league. “All the little, small moments that I used to just [think]: ‘Oh, I’m so tired, I don’t want to go to practice today. And, oh, this and that.’ That has changed, honestly. Just appreciating everything because tomorrow’s not guaranteed.”

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Griner is averaging 19.1 points, 6.4 rebounds, 1.7 assists and 2.4 blocks on a career-high 61.8% shooting through her first nine games of the 2023 season. She is back to being the Mercury’s best player, dominating in the post over swarms of defenders and blocking everything that comes her way on the other end of the floor. After being an honorary All-Star selection last season, Griner was named an All-Star starter on Sunday.

But what may be even more impressive is the enthusiasm and spirit she has brought to the Mercury and the WNBA, constantly flashing her trademark smile, joking around at press conferences, and uplifting her teammates at every opportunity.

“We were all hoping that she was going to be OK coming back, and that she did not lose her light, and she really didn’t,” says Mercury forward Megan Gustafson, adding that Griner’s presence has transformed the locker room. “I think we were a little bit surprised, because anyone that goes through an experience like that – I mean, I couldn’t even imagine being the same person. But she really is and I’m just so proud of her and just the light that she brings again … It’s really just her light, her positivity that [has] shone through.”

Sandy Brondello, who coached Griner in Phoenix for eight seasons prior to moving on to New York, is also glowing about the player’s return to the WNBA. “It’s like sometimes we sweat having a bad game – she was in prison,” says Brondello. “She had to live in prison for such a long time. So I think she has that joy. Just go out there and play.”

Griner has brought a lot of attention to the WNBA, which was already growing rapidly. Not only is the league averaging almost 1,000 more fans a game in Griner’s return season, but its broadcasts have also hit record viewership numbers – up 49% from last season across ESPN networks.

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“I think that if you look at last season, there was something and someone missing in the WNBA and that was obviously Brittney Griner,” former WNBA MVP and Griner’s one-time UMMC Ekaterinburg teammate Breanna Stewart says. “So the ability to have her back here kind of makes our circle complete, because she is such a force and a presence on and off the court and her ability to kind of be so dominant and aggressive but also such a kind, caring person – everybody’s missed that.”

Griner’s on-court play cannot be separated from her political advocacy off it, especially in a league as socially active as the WNBA. And Griner’s imprisonment has forced the WNBA to reckon with its lackluster treatment of athletes in the past, forcing the league to improve pay and travel standards so that the Griner situation does not repeat itself.

After all, the primary reason that Griner was in Russia in the first place is because her salary at UMMC Ekaterinburg is over $1m compared to the $165,100 she will make this year in the WNBA. In fact, 67 of the league’s 144 players still played internationally last off-season despite Griner’s detainment. Doing so is a financial necessity rather than a choice for most of the world’s best female basketball players.

The incident also highlighted concerns about commercial travel for WNBA players, many of whom are gay, Black women who can be targets of abuse. In fact, Griner has already been harassed this season when a conservative media personality confronted her and her teammates inside a Dallas airport in mid-June.

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In the past, the league has argued that charter flights create an unfair competitive advantage for teams that can afford to pay for them, fining the New York Liberty $500,000 for chartering flights last season. But the WNBA has already made improvements this season, allowing private flights for back-to-back games and for all playoff games. And after the news of Griner’s harassment and the pressure that came from it, the league recently announced that teams are permitted to fly on a public chartering service called JSX for the rest of the season.

It’s a step in the right direction that may not have been possible if not for Griner – a singular force who is as easy to galvanize around because of her on-court performances as she is for her personality. The league still has a long way to go in regards to growing the game and improving standards for its athletes, but Griner’s return has undoubtedly expedited the process.

“It’s a shame that it had to get to rock bottom. Because I feel like waiting for something to happen and then making a change, you don’t know what that something’s gonna be,” Griner said. “We’ve all seen what can happen in this world. And when you play the ‘let’s wait and see game,’ you’re really playing with fire. You’re playing with people’s lives.

“So I’m glad that they finally got it together and are going to allow us to do this. It’s just a shame that it took so damn long.”

Her return to the United States marked a triumphant comeback to the WNBA, where she signed a one-year deal with the Phoenix Mercury and quickly regained her dominant form, earning an All-Star starter designation in the 2023 season.

Griner’s experience has catalyzed changes in the WNBA, including improved travel standards and heightened awareness of the financial pressures that lead players to compete overseas.

Title:

Content: Basketball: Brittney Griner′s Russian detention highlights WNBA′s growing problem | Sports | German football and major international sports news | DW | 05.05.2022

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Basketball: Brittney Griner's Russian detention highlights WNBA's growing problem

The WNBA is seen as the world's best women's basketball league. However, the arrest of one of its biggest stars has highlighted problems involving time and money that are forcing players to go abroad in the off-season.

Brittney Griner is being held on drug charges in a Russian prison at present

The 2022 season of the US Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) starts this week with one of its biggest stars, Brittney Griner, still being held in a Russian jail.

The superstar center was arrested for being in possession of vape cartridges that contained cannabis oil during a flight out of Moscow in February. Though legal in the US, the substance is considered illegal in Russia.

The US State Department has spoken out against Griner's detention, a situation complicated by Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. In doing so they promised to "provide appropriate support" ahead of her next court date on May 19.

Griner, 31, has won the WNBA title and Most Valuable Player award with the Phoenix Mercury; two Olympic gold medals and two FIBA Basketball World Cups with USA Basketball Women's National Team.

Yet under the WNBA's salary cap, she earns a fraction of the eyewatering multi-million-dollar deals the likes of Stephen Curry and LeBron James command in the NBA. As a result Griner has spent time in Russia where she has racked up four EuroLeague titles with UMMC Ekaterinburg and a healthy pay cheque.

Uncapped salaries?

Since being founded in 1996, the WNBA has not had the audience to command premium rights deals from television networks. The result is that players, most of whom don't hold Griner's superstar status, are now being forced to move abroad in the off-season to financially set themselves up for the future.

The WNBA season runs from May to September/October with the off-season spent either resting, working in US media or going to play in countries like Australia, China, France and Russia.

While the salary cap in the WNBA sees the highest earners command a salary of $228,094 (€215,067) per season, playing abroad is more lucrative because players can negotiate higher wages.

In Russia, many of the stars can earn upwards of three times the salary, with Griner reportedly earning up to a million dollars during her stints with UMMC Ekaterinburg.

This is all made possible by Russian oligarch owners, like Andrei Kozitsyn and Iskander Makhmudov, who enable teams to provide players with lavish lifestyles, cash gifts and travel accomodations. In contrast, the WNBA recently fined the New York Liberty for creating an unfair advantage after the club chartered private flights for its team.

Russian clubs have also proven willing to go the extra mile as far back as 2015 when Diana Taurasi, the 2009 WNBA MVP, was paid $1.5 million (€1.42 million) by Griner's Russian employers in Ekaterinburg to skip the WNBA season entirely. Taurasi admitted it was a deal that her agent advised "would be financially irresponsible" to pass up.

The inevitable overseas lure

When Evelyn Akhator was selected third overall pick in the WNBA Draft in 2017 by the Dallas Wings, she knew that it was just one step in what she hopes will be a long-lasting professional career.

Evelyn Akhator say that Russia is 'where the real money is' for women basketball players

"As soon as I signed with an agent, they started to look for jobs overseas for me. Unless I told them otherwise, I knew I was going to play overseas," Akhator told DW. "That is where the real money is."

Akhator spent one season with the Wings before leaving to join Dynamo Novosibirsk in Russia where she played against Griner. She told DW of a lonely experience without family, friends or people who looked like her in an environment where being targeted by racist remarks was common on the streets.

The silver lining was that she was able to earn more than double what her rookie contract offered in the WNBA and, since then, she has competed in Turkey, Spain and is currently playing in France with the Flammes Carolo.

By comparison, the season in France is longer than the WNBA's, meaning she can stay active and negotiate a better salary. For her and many others, opportunites like this offer the chance to save up for a future after basketball.

Plugging the overseas loophole

The WNBA's 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) with the WNBA Players Association wants to make it more difficult for players to go overseas during the off-season.

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert wants players to "prioritize" the league instead of playing abroad, The main reason being that leagues in Europe usually end in April, which affects players when they report back for pre-season training camps that same month. DW asked the WNBA and the Players' Association for comment on potential future changes to the season schedule, but received no response.

Free Brittney: Griner's detention could make other players rethink Russian money

From 2023, those who report late to camp will forfeit 1% of their base salary, while players who fail to arrive before the opening night will forfeit their season's pay. Those measures will get stronger in 2024, when players who fail to arrive before the first day of training will forgo being a part of the team.

Those harsher measures are offset by promises of higher salaries as the WNBA hopes to raise the salary cap for their top players to $500,000 (€471,445) thanks to increased marketing opportunities.

But with the war in Ukraine and the sanctions on Russia ongoing, the appetite for going overseas is expected to reduce. The WNBA announced that Griner's initials and jersey number (42) will be featured along the sideline of all 12 WNBA courts, but as her family and friends await her return from Russia, her arrest is forcing players to rethink. Is the money worth it?

In the future, safety overseas will be key when players ask their agents for work, but Akhator doesn't believe that Griner's arrest would deter WNBA players entirely. "I think it is better for players to have a longer season and get paid six, seven-figure [salaries], I think that would really help."

Edited by: James Thorogood

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Since returning home, Griner has faced psychological and emotional challenges stemming from her time in a Russian penal colony, including feelings of vulnerability and the need to heal her mind, body, and spirit.

Title:

Content: Brittney Griner’s Wife, Cherelle, Makes First Social Media Post Since WNBA Star’s Return

by Jonathan Howard

Brittney Griner is home and her wife Cherelle is relieved to have her back. She had a lot of people to thank as she broke her silence online. On Monday, Cherelle made her first social media post since Griner returned to the United States. This is an emotional time for the family.

As Brittney Griner has settled back into her life here in the states, Cherelle was thanking all of the people that helped make it possible. Griner was held in Russia for months for possessing vape pen cartridges. When an agreement on her release was made, she had been living at a Russian penal colony.

On Instagram, Cherelle was thankful for a lot of folks.

“Yesterday my heart was made whole thanks to the collective efforts of MANY!” she wrote. “I’m humbled by their hearts. To care for another, a stranger to some, a friend to some – is humanity in its purest form! As BG and I start our journey to heal our minds, bodies, and spirits – I wanted to personally say thank you to some of the hands; seen and unseen, that helped make it possible for me to see my wife again!”

In her post, she thanked the Biden Administration as well as various members of congress. While thanking all those involved, Cherelle also thanked Paul Whelan’s family.

“I appreciate each and every one of you – Let’s continue to use our hands, voices, platforms, and resources to bring Paul and all Americans home. All families deserve to be whole!” the post ended.

Brittney Griner Returns to Basketball Workouts

While Brittney Griner is a lot of things, she is a basketball player. So, she’s already back to practicing and the WNBA forward has still got it. During her detainment and imprisonment in Russia, Griner was offered the chance to practice playing basketball. However, given her situation, it didn’t feel right.

ESPN reported that Griner had a light workout and was able to dunk a basketball. She has not made a decision on when or if she will return to basketball as a professional. After the 10 months that she has been through, it is no surprise that she is taking time to make this decision.

The entire basketball world is behind Brittney Griner. She has had a lot of support from the NBA and WNBA. When it comes time to make that decision, she will make it. Until then, it’s just about getting back to her normal life.

Outsider.com

Griner has publicly addressed her adjustment to life post-incarceration by emphasizing the importance of collective support and encouraging advocacy for other wrongfully detained Americans.

Title:

Content: Brittney Griner Asks Fans, Advocates to Write Letters to Paul Whelan: 'It's Our Turn to Support'

The WNBA star shared Whelan's mailing address and said, "I hope you'll join me in writing to Paul Whelan and continuing to advocate for other Americans to be rescued and returned to their families"

Brittney Griner has a request for her supporters this holiday season.

The WNBA star, who was released from Russian custody on Dec. 8, penned a handwritten letter to her Instagram followers on Wednesday morning, asking those who helped advocate for her safe return to do the same for Paul Whelan and other families of wrongfully detained loved ones.

"Thanks to the efforts of many, including you, I am home after nearly 10 months," Griner wrote. "You took time to show me you cared, and I want to personally take the time to write to you and say that your effort mattered."

Griner said the letters she received from fans and friends, through the #WeAreBG campaign, helped her "to not lose hope during a time" filled with "regret."

She described her feeling "vulnerable in ways I could have never imagined," in the letter.

The Phoenix Mercury center thanked those who wrote to her "from the bottom of my heart" and said that it was because of those communications of support that she "never lost hope" over the course of her detainment.

The letters were "bigger than uplifting" for the WNBA star, though. Griner explained that the thousands of messages she received showed her "the power of collective hands" and now, she hopes to help Whelan, the former U.S. marine who has been imprisoned in Russia for four years on espionage charges, and other detained Americans, come home.

"Together, we can do hard things," Griner wrote. "I'm living proof of that."

"My family is whole and now, thanks to you, we are fortunate to get to spend the holidays together," she wrote. "However, there remain too many families with loved ones wrongfully detained."

Griner explained, "Those families stood alongside you and all who supported the #WeAreBG campaign to bring me home, and it's our turn to support them. I hope you'll join me in writing to Paul Whelan and continuing to advocate for other Americans to be rescued and returned to their families."

Griner ended her letter by thanking fans once more, adding, "I hope your holiday season is full of joy and love."

She included Whelan's mailing address at the bottom of her note. He is currently receiving mail through the American Citizen Services Unit Consular, per the address.

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Griner's intention to help Whelan and other Americans was first confirmed by her agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, in an ESPN interview after her release. Colas said both Griner and her wife, Cherelle, plan to "raise attention" for other families with loved ones detained abroad.

When Cherelle spoke from the White House following the announcement of Brittney's return, she said, "Today my family is whole, but as you are all aware, there are so many families who are not whole."

She added that she will continue advocating for "getting every American home, including Paul, whose family is in our hearts today."

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Her arrest and imprisonment sparked global discussions about the inequities faced by female athletes, including the financial necessity for WNBA players to compete overseas, and the broader implications of her wrongful detention as a political pawn.

Griner’s eventual release through a controversial prisoner swap underscored the complexities of international diplomacy and reignited debates about the treatment of marginalized groups in sports.

The prisoner swap involving Griner and Viktor Bout has raised concerns about incentivizing adversaries like Russia to detain American citizens as leverage for future negotiations.

While the swap demonstrated that the U.S. and Russia can negotiate when interests align, analysts caution that it does not signal a broader thaw in relations, as tensions remain high due to issues like the war in Ukraine.

Griner’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment have also underscored the economic inequities in women’s sports, as her need to play overseas to supplement her WNBA income reflects broader gender pay disparities.

Her experience has sparked discussions about the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in sports, with advocates emphasizing the importance of addressing systemic discrimination and improving conditions for marginalized athletes.

Griner has expressed profound gratitude for the support she received during her detention, noting that the letters and advocacy efforts helped her maintain hope and resilience during her imprisonment.

In her reflections, Griner emphasized the importance of collective action, urging her supporters to extend their advocacy to other wrongfully detained Americans, such as Paul Whelan.