Griner’s wife says U.S. officials bungled call

WNBA center Brittney Griner tried to call her wife nearly a dozen times through the American embassy in Russia on the couple’s fourth anniversary Saturday, but they didn’t connect because the phone line at the embassy was not staffed, Cherelle Griner said Monday.

The two have not spoken by phone in the four months since Griner’s arrest in Russia, where she remains jailed for what authorities said was possession of vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. That was to have changed Saturday, when a longawaited call was to have taken place after getting Russian government approval. But the day came and went without any contact, leaving an anguished Cherelle Griner to wonder what went wrong.

On Monday, she said she learned from her wife’s lawyers a more distressing truth: Brittney Griner actually had tried to call 11 times over a period of several hours, dialing a number she’d been given at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, which the couple had been told would then patch the call through to Cherelle Griner in

Phoenix. But each time, the call went unanswered because the desk at the embassy where the phone rang was apparently unstaffed Saturday.

“I was distraught. I was hurt. I was done, fed up,” Cherelle Griner said. “... It just knocked me out. I wasn’t well. I’m still not well.”

The State Department said Monday that “we deeply regret that Brittney Griner was unable to speak with her wife because of a logistical error.”

Cherelle Griner said a contact in the U.S. government had apologized to her for the error.