'My life became a blur': US basketball star relives ordeal of Russian prison

Brittney Griner, the US basketball star who was imprisoned in Russia for 10 months then released as part of a prisoner swap, has revealed that she contemplated suicide while in jail.

- Andrew Roth

In her first interviews since being freed, Griner described her arrest, the shocking conditions she endured, and her difficult readjustment to ordinary life after being exchanged for the convicted weapons smuggler Viktor Bout in December 2022.

"I've never been so dirty in my life," she told the New York Times of her time in detention. "I felt horrible." She added that the US president, Joe Biden, had told her wife, Cherelle, not to put pressure on him in public during negotiations because it "would play into Russia's hands".

Griner was arrested in February 2022 at a Moscow airport after Russian authorities said a search of her luggage revealed vape cartridges containing cannabis oil. She later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years in prison.

"I wanted to take my life more than once in the first weeks," Griner told the ABC news anchor Robin Roberts in an interview to promote her forthcoming memoir, Coming Home. "I felt like leaving here so badly." She decided against doing so in part because she was afraid the Russian authorities would not release her body to her family.

Griner said she had packed the cannabis oil in error due to a "mental lapse", similar to misplacing car keys but on "a more grand scale".