Brittney Griner’s wife says she’s spoken to her only twice by phone since she was detained in Russia in February and that the WNBA star fears being “abandoned and forgotten”.
Cherelle Griner, wife of Brittney Griner, said in an interview broadcast on Thursday by “CBS Morning“She was relieved on the first call, but she heard the weariness and fatigue in her wife’s voice on the second call.
“I think I cried for about two, three days in a row,” she said. “It was the most disturbing phone call I’ve ever had.”
Cherelle Griner did not specify when the second phone call occurred, but described her wife at the lowest emotional point she can recall. Cherelle Griner said: “She was very afraid of being abandoned and forgotten in Russia, or completely used to doing her own harm.
Brittney Griner, 31, stopped for drug charges at an airport near Moscow: Customs officials accused her of carrying a vape box with hash oil in her luggage. She returned to Russia to play for UMMC Yekaterinburg, the powerhouse’s professional women’s basketball team.
In August, a Russian court sentenced her to nine years in prison.
Her detention comes at a sensitive geopolitical moment near the beginning of Russia’s continued invasion of Ukraine amid strained Russian diplomatic relations with the United States. In May, the State Department determined that she had been improperly detained.
In June, the Biden administration offers to free Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in exchange for Griner and Paul Whelan, a former US Marine convicted in Russia of espionage charges.
“He’s doing what he can,” Cherelle Griner said of President Biden. “But there is another side to this situation, and we are also dealing with the need for Russia to have mercy on BG.”
An appeal hearing for Brittney Griner is set for October 25.
“Once that hearing is held and the order is completed, BG is now in a position where she could be sent to a labor camp,” said Cherelle Griner. “My brain can’t even make sense of it.”
