Brittney Griner chain smoked, outwitted suspected spies in Russian prison

Brittney Griner’s new book “Coming Home” (Knopf, 2024) is a blunt depiction of the cold steel and desperation felt in a modern Russian gulag.

Co-written with Michelle Burford, founding editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, it is also an intensely personal story of what it means to be Brittney Griner. To wit, to grow up astonishingly tall (6 feet, 9 inches) and oft-mistaken for a man — a humiliation that cut deeply in her childhood and well beyond.

Told in Griner’s voice, which is both a touch profane and unexpectedly witty — in fact, laugh-out-loud hilarious in parts — it reads as if you’re sitting comfortably in a family room hearing her tell her story for the first time.

The book teems with insights and surprises about the WNBA Phoenix Mercury star, her life and her ordeal as Vladimer Putin’s hostage.

1. Griner was teased and insulted

If you are Brittney Griner, you were relentlessly teased by classmates in the Houston public schools because you grew so much faster than the other boys and girls.

“(It) was cruel and endless, a series of humiliations,” Griner recalled. Once in hallway a girl shouted out, “She’s a boy. ... Everyone cracked up, and I backed away, partly out of shock but mostly because the laughter cut me deep.”

The indignities would continue.

Griner as an adult once walked into a women’s restroom in a U.S. airport and was immediately reported. Two airport workers went in, one knocked on her stall door and said, ‘Sir, you need to come out. This is the women’s bathroom.’ ”

Griner had seen it all before. She told them she was a woman and saw their puzzled looks.

“I yanked down my sweats and showed them my privates — woot! — a flash to settle the question. ‘We are so, so sorry,’ one lady said, while the other cupped her hand over her mouth. Everyone’s ‘so sorry.’ That does nothing to soothe the ache.”

In Russian prison, she would endure the same cruel stares from guards who saw her in all stages of undress, and eventually she stopped caring. “I’d been humiliated into numbness,” Griner wrote.

2. She thought the family name was soiled

As she awaited trial for possession of less than a gram of hash oil she used for pain relief, Griner was held at Correctional Colony No. 1, or IK-1, a former orphanage converted to a women’s prison.

In the early days, a guard turned on a TV and she beheld the grainy news images of herself. She realized she had become a global story.

“I cried because I’d let down my father. The Griner name was now stained around the globe: dopehead, drug dealer, dumb. I hurt because I knew I’d handed the world a weapon.

“When you’re Black, your behavior is never just about you. It’s about your entire community. You live with this responsibility to represent the best of us, to prove the haters wrong.”

3. Life in Russian prison was filthy, nuts

Prison life in the gulag was controlled by rules, many of them that seemed absolutely nuts.

For instance, the prisoners would walk around in shoes without laces, because shoelaces were strictly forbidden. However, once the guards accidently failed to retrieve a large knife they had placed on a table for the prisoners to use in their multi-person cell, she wrote.

“The guards were supposed to pick up the sharp items. On this day they’d forgotten. Um, you can’t have shoelaces, but you can have a knife? So ass-backward.”

Griner wasn't arrested: She was taken hostage

The showers were filthy and the other inmates warned her to never touch a toilet seat if you get put in another cell. One inmate kept track of the diseases of inmates in those other cells.

“The place was crawling with diseases ... from herpes and chlamydia to HIV and AIDS.”

4. A Russian prison work saw injured many

Griner tried to get a spot in the work detail that did welding. She had experience there. But the guards told her it would be too dangerous.

Instead, she was placed in a group cutting fabric for Russian military uniforms, using a spinning blade that seemed to scream danger. It was rusty, had no shield and looked like a holdover from the old Soviet Union, she wrote.

“Lose concentration and you might lose a thumb. Several of the thirty women in my group were missing fingers,” she recalled. “My partner had a long scar on her face, starting near her eye.”

5. Her chain-smoking repelled a suspected spy

Placed in a cell with seven other women, Griner noticed one inmate was most often chosen by guards to be room captain when they conducted a search. That inmate had friendly chats with the guards and once slipped a note to one of the guards. “Everything about her said spy,” Griner wrote.

“... I had no clue what she was sharing, and that was what scared me: not knowing what she was whispering about me, and to whom. That was why I said less and less to her.”

As the weeks and months ground on, Griner started smoking 12-13 cigarettes a day. “That whole facility was one big smokehouse. Smoke even floated through our vents, from the women puffing upstairs.”

Olya, the suspected spy, was a non-smoker and griped when others did, Griner wrote.

“‘You’re young,’ I told her while pulling out my next cig. ‘Your lungs can take it.’

“I secretly wanted to smoke her ass right out of there.”

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Brittney Griner chain smoked, suspected spies in Russian prison