WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner speaks to her lawyers standing in a cage at a court room prior to a hearing, in Khimki just outside Moscow on July 26.Alexander Zemlianichenko/The Associated Press
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Rachel Giese is deputy national editor at The Globe and Mail.
One of the United States’ greatest athletes, a generational talent who should now be enjoying a post-season break, is instead steeling herself for a nine-year sentence in a Russian penal colony. Human rights advocates warn she is facing grueling labour, limited rations of food, inadequate health care, poor sanitation and abuse at the hands of guards and other incarcerated people. This isn’t the plot of a Cold War thriller, but the nightmare-ish reality of WNBA star Brittney Griner, who lost her appeal on Tuesday in a Russian court on a dubious drug smuggling arrest.
If you’re unfamiliar with Griner, it’s worth considering why. After all, it’s hard to overstate her contribution to basketball: In college, she scored 3,203 points and blocked 736 shots, an NCAA record for men and women. She has won an NCAA and a WNBA championship, as well two Olympic gold medals. She is one of the best players in the game – the equivalent of a Giannis Antetokounmpo or a Kevin Durant – and, yet, despite all this, she earns a fraction of their income and public attention. When it seems like the world has forgotten Griner and her horrific ordeal, it bears asking: Would she be facing nearly a decade in prison in Russia if she were a male athlete?
A little background: Back in February, Griner was detained at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport after a customs dog detected drugs in her carry-on luggage. When officers searched it, they found two vape cartridges containing cannabis oil – which Griner uses to manage pain – and they took her into custody. Marijuana is illegal in Russia.
The following months have turned Kafkaesque. The first few weeks after her arrest, the U.S. kept the situation deliberately quiet for fear that too much attention would make her more valuable to Russia and stall her release. Then, after Russia invaded Ukraine, it became apparent that her detainment, which was extended multiple times, was being used in part for political reasons. Her case went to trial and she was found guilty of the drug charges in early August. Efforts like a prisoner exchange have so far failed and with the denial of her appeal last week, it’s unclear what options remain.
In a statement on Twitter, Griner’s agent Lindsay Kagawa Colas said: “Brittney Griner’s nine-plus year sentence is regarded as harsh and extreme by Russian legal standards. Today’s disappointing, yet unsurprising, appeal outcome further validates the fact that she is being held hostage and is being used as a political pawn.”
What puts Griner even more in peril is that she is a Black, queer woman incarcerated in a country that is deeply hostile to Black and LGBTQ people. A 2013 law banned the “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to children. It has been used to broadly quash any positive public discussion or gathering related to LGBTQ issues that a child might potentially come across. And a new bill, introduced last week, could expand the ban even further to encompass all age groups.
But the discrimination and injustice that Griner is currently facing didn’t start this year, nor did they even start in Russia. They began with the very reason Griner was in Russia in the first place. Like many elite women athletes, she cannot earn anything close to her male counterparts playing professionally in U.S. leagues. During her off season, she plays in Russia for the team UMMC Ekaterinburg, where she earns about US$1-million – almost five times her annual WNBA salary. By comparison, the top players in the NBA earn in excess of US$40-million.
As many commentators have pointed out, Griner’s tragic situation is not simply one of being caught between two battling foreign powers. It also illuminates the gross gender inequality in sport in North America. And, in a league like the WNBA in which the majority of the players are racialized people and a significant number are LGBTQ, it highlights the particular impact of this inequality on Black and queer women.
Right now, Griner’s safety, even her survival, seem uncertain. Earlier this month, before her appeal was denied, her wife, Cherelle Griner, laid out the stakes for her partner: She is “at her absolute weakest moment in life now,” she told journalist Gayle King. “She’s very afraid about being left and forgotten in Russia or just completely used to the point of her detriment.”
One can only imagine how Griner is faring now. And even if interventions are successful in securing her release and bringing her home, will the sports world here in North America ever become fairer and more just to players like Griner?
What else we’re thinking about:
I’ve loved Irish actress Sharon Horgan since I binged Catastrophe, her comedy series with Rob Delaney, in which they played a couple who end up happy-ish-ever-after when she becomes pregnant following a brief hook-up. Bad Sisters, her new murder mystery show for Apple TV+ (which she wrote and produced), is even funnier and darker. Based on a Belgian series and moving back and forth in time, the show features Horgan as the eldest of five siblings, four of whom are plotting to kill the abusive husband of the fifth. Like another show I’ve enjoyed, I May Destroy You, the series tackles trauma with poignancy and humour, while putting women’s experiences and relationships at its centre.
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