Brittney Griner said she wrote a painful letter to her wife while still locked inside a Russian detention center, part of the ordeal that began when authorities arrested her in February 2022 and later found cartridges containing hash oil in her luggage.
Griner told WHYY that the note was written before she left the facility. She said she wanted her wife to promise two things: that she would still be her friend and that she would still write to her. “I was still at the detention center when I wrote this one,” Griner said. “It was a hard letter to write. It’s just like that’s a long time. It’s already a long time for someone to do it in the states, but you can visit them occasionally. You could never visit me [in Russia]. I wanted her to promise me that she’d still be my friend, that she’d still write to me.”
The detention marked one of the most intense stretches of Griner’s career off the court. She had traveled to Russia to join UMMC Ekaterinburg, the team she played for starting in 2014, and her case quickly became a national topic after her arrest. A Russian court later handed her a nine-year sentence, and she remained behind bars for nearly 10 months before being exchanged for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout and returning to the Phoenix Mercury.
Griner’s account adds a private detail to a public saga that stretched far beyond basketball. Four years after the traumatic moment, she is back home and still dominating on the court, but the letter shows how much of the experience was measured in days without visits, ordinary contact or certainty about what came next.
The exchange ended the legal and diplomatic standoff, but the letter she described is a reminder that the hardest part of the case was not only the sentencing or the swap. It was the attempt to stay connected from inside a cell, and the answer to the question raised by her own words is plain: Griner survived the detention, returned to Phoenix and kept her relationship intact.
