.louisahthomas writes about the W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner, and how the campaign to free her could improve matters for other Americans wrongfully detained around the world.
The cage was small, even for a cage, and Brittney Griner ducked her head as she entered it. By then, a month into her trial in Khimki, outside of Moscow, for charges of drug possession, she knew the drill. She pursed her lips as she offered her long inked arms to the guard, who unlocked the handcuffs. Griner wore a gray T-shirt, gray shoes, charcoal joggers; her dreadlocks were pulled back, and wire-rimmed glasses framed her large, weary eyes.
On May 3rd, the State Department declared her “wrongfully detained,” a designation which meant that the U.S. government would be involved in negotiating her release. Her trial began several weeks later. Griner and her lawyers pleaded for leniency, but everyone knew better than to hope for it. A foreign citizen arrested in the possession of a tiny amount of drugs might usually be given no more than a month in jail, a fine, and deportation.
Griner knew from an early age that she was attracted to girls. By middle school, she was five feet ten and skinny. Her classmates groped her flat chest, taunted her, and called her a boy, she writes. She desperately wanted to fit in, but she seems to have been pulled by an equally strong urge to be honest and open. She knew her father did not approve of homosexuality, and dreaded displeasing him; she tried to telegraph her sexuality by wearing boys’ boxer briefs.
Somehow, she managed to hold onto some of that joyousness even in prison. When her teammate Brianna Turner wrote Griner, and told her that she was being made an honorary All Star, Griner joked that she would have “the worst stat line in the history of the All Star Game”—zero points, zero rebounds, zero assists. Griner’s sense of humor in her letters “did surprise me, but it does speak to the kind of the person she is—the life of the party, the one who always makes people laugh,” Turner said.
When the U.S. government designated Griner wrongfully detained, in May, it signalled, on an official level, that a special envoy would work in parallel with the consular’s office, and that the most likely path for Griner’s return to the U.S. was diplomatic negotiation, possibly including a prisoner exchange. Unofficially, it signalled that the government considered her criminal trial a sham.
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