RELIEVED GRINER SPEAKS ABOUT RUSSIA
Brittney Griner, the WNBA star who became the center of a geopolitical showdown between the United States and Russia last year, said Thursday that her management team has been in touch with the family of Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter detained in Russia and classified by the U.S. government as a wrongful detainee.
Griner, who was detained in Russia for nearly 10 months last year, spoke with news reporters for the first time since her release in December in a prisoner exchange. She said that nobody, including Gershkovich, deserved an experience similar to her imprisonment.
“I have that mindset of, you know, no man left behind. No man, no woman left behind,” Griner said, citing her family’s military background, including her father’s service in the Marines during the Vietnam War. She added: “No one should be in those conditions, hands down.”
Griner, who has played for the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury since 2013, said it “hurts” in part to have been released before other Americans who have been detained longer and to see the recent arrest of Gershkovich.
He was detained by Russian security services in late March and charged with espionage in mid-April, an accusation that his employer and U.S. officials strongly deny. Griner was at an airport near Moscow in February 2022 when customs officials detained her for carrying a small amount of a marijuana concentrate in vape cartridges in her luggage. In August, she was sentenced to nine years in a penal colony after she was convicted on drug charges.
She was freed as part of a prisoner exchange in December; Viktor Bout, an arms dealer nicknamed the Merchant of Death, was sent back to Russia. He had been convicted in 2011 on charges that included conspiring to kill Americans. Griner and Bout crossed paths on a tarmac in the United Arab Emirates, the site of the exchange.
Since her return, Griner has vowed to help other Americans who are considered wrongfully detained. On Thursday, she said that she had not spoken directly to Gershkovich’s family, but that the Mercury and Wasserman, the agency that represents her, had been “sharing knowledge, which is a big thing.”
She added: “It goes a long way because, I mean, you’re in foreign territory and you’re in unknown waters. So there’s a lot that we might know that they didn’t know so there’s been a lot of communication between both teams.”
Also on Thursday, three major American newspapers jointly called for Gershkovich’s release, with a fullpage ad in each of their print editions. The ad, published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, said the arrest was “the latest in a disturbing trend where journalists are harassed, arrested or worse for reporting the news.”
“Reporting is crime,” the ad said.
Gershkovich was arrested on a reporting trip in Yekaterinburg, the city where Griner had played professionally during the WNBA offseason.
She said Thursday that she did not plan to play outside the United States again unless she was representing the country in the Olympics. Griner has been a major contributor for the U.S. team, winning gold medals in 2016 and 2021.
She also said she wouldn’t “knock” any player who wanted to go overseas to supplement a WNBA salary, which is a small fraction of what men’s basketball players earn and often less than international women’s teams pay.
Griner said that she had not played any basketball while detained, but that she took a few jump shots with her wife and dunked on her once as they shot baskets at a military base in San Antonio when she arrived back in the United States. Still, she said that her training has been frustrating because she is well short of her top form. not
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