When basketball great Brittney Griner headed in February 2022 to Russia, where she played in the WNBA off season, she had no idea what was in store for her. Arriving at the Moscow airport, authorities combed through her luggage and discovered a minute amount of cannabis oil, which the athlete used to treat pain from injuries. Griner, in a rush to make her flight, had forgotten she left an oil cartridge in her luggage. Russian officials promptly arrested her.
Griner’s nightmare traversing Russia’s court and penal system is explored in the documentary The Brittney Griner Story, which just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Brittney Griner during a court appearance in Moscow on August 4, 2022.
Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images
“I really tried to kind of do a play-by-play in the beginning of the film,” of what happened to Griner in Russia, director Alexandria Stapleton explained as she visited Deadline’s Sundance Studio. “Brittney leaving the States, at the airport, and those first few days for her [in Russia] and what she was feeling and trying to capture that, but also trying to understand what her wife [Cherelle] was feeling, what Lindsay [Kagawa Colas], her agent was feeling as they were trying to scurry to figure out how to get her out. And then the Russian Ukrainian war starts, and we all saw that and were all horrified, but really understanding how for all of them, all the parties involved, that it kind of felt like the door was going to be shut.”
The door was shut hard, for political reasons. The film suggests the Kremlin made sure Griner got a very harsh sentence – 9 years – so it could use her as a bargaining chip as relations with the West deteriorated following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Griner was eventually dispatched to a Russian gulag to serve her sentence. She told us what it was like to be incarcerated there.
“The conditions were definitely, definitely dire,” Griner recalled. “The penal colony, you wake up early, early in the morning, the sun’s not even up yet, and you have to do roll call, and you stand [outdoors] while they walk by with a piece of paper and a piece of wood, and literally mark each person. It’s not like an electronic system or something a little bit more efficient. No. And you’re just standing there in line while it’s snowing. It could be a blizzard, it could be raining, it can be any condition, and you’re just standing there. And that’s when I realized that I had been standing there so long when the snow piled up on my shoulders and on top of my head and I had to knock it off of me.”
In the film, Griner describes an industrial scale sewing operation, full of dangerous equipment, where she worked alongside Russian women, some of whom lost digits to the machines.
“I was with the ‘second offenders’ and noisy, yelling, screaming machines, breaking blades flying,” Griner said. “You look at every woman in there missing fingers.”
Brittney Griner with wife Cherelle Griner
Leon Bennett/Getty Images
The Brittney Griner Story tracks her career on the court long before the arrest, coming out to her parents, marriage to Cherelle, the arduous process it took to get her out of Russia in a prisoner exchange, and the challenges she faced getting back into shape to play hoops again.
“It was hard to find that strength,” Griner conceded. “I have a video on my phone my wife took of me literally crying in the locker room my first time getting back into it. My body was completely different. Everything was just harder. It was an uphill battle.”
The documentary will air on ESPN at a future date as part of the network’s 30 For 30 series.
Watch the full conversation in the video above.
Deadline Studio at Sundance presented by Casamigos.