When she arrived in Moscow, she stopped in customs earlier than her switch flight to Yekaterinburg, a smaller metropolis the place her Russian staff was primarily based. She loaded her carry-ons onto the conveyor belt on the safety checkpoint and ready to stroll by the steel detector. She seen brokers pulling individuals out of line — all foreigners. “They had been singling out anyone that didn’t look Russian,” she mentioned. “I simply felt like they had been looking for one thing.”
At first, after they flagged her baggage, Griner wasn’t too involved. This was her eighth season in Russia; she paid taxes there and was acquainted with the nation and its legal guidelines. The customs agent requested her to go looking her personal objects, which she discovered uncommon. As quickly as she felt the cannabis-oil cartridge stowed in a zippered internal pocket in her backpack, her abdomen sank. Medical marijuana had been prescribed by a doctor in Arizona to deal with her continual ache, nevertheless it was unlawful in Russia. “I used to be like: Oh, [expletive]. Oh, that is about to be unhealthy,” she instructed me, and continued to element the occasions of the day. One other cartridge was present in a curler bag. She panicked, calling and texting Cherelle and her household. Nobody answered. It was the midnight in america, and so they had been all asleep.
Griner was instructed to attend whereas the agent took the cartridges for testing, alongside together with her passport. Different officers arrived and demanded that she signal a doc in Russian. Nyet, she replied, pushing it away. She used Google Translate to search for one other phrase: advocat, which means “lawyer.” They pressured her to signal till she buckled, writing her identify. The brokers took her exterior and loaded her into an unofficial-looking sedan and drove her to a redbrick constructing. The officers later got here again with terrifying information: They’d examined her cartridges and mentioned they discovered 0.7 grams of hashish oil complete in two vape pens. Griner was charged with unlawful drug possession and smuggling a “vital quantity” of narcotics into the nation, punishable by as much as 10 years in jail and a effective of 1,000,000 rubles, which was then about $15,000.
By now, Cherelle and Griner’s agent, Lindsay Colas, had been awake. Griner had been capable of ship a location pin by WhatsApp of the place she was being held, and Colas frantically organized for a Russian lawyer, Alex Boykov, to satisfy her. When Boykov arrived, investigators continued interrogating Griner. They needed to know why she was in Russia, why she was bringing “medicine” in, whom they had been for. Afterward, she was handcuffed and squeezed into one other tiny civilian automobile. For hours, she sat hunched over in ache as she was pushed throughout Moscow — a sightseeing tour from hell. The automobile lastly stopped at an area detention heart.
Griner was led to a cell and given some bedding for a discolored mattress. Her telephone had been taken, however she had been allowed to maintain a small bag of private objects, which she full of some garments and her Sudoku ebook. The room stank: A feces-stained gap within the floor served as the bathroom. The jail guards introduced her a milky porridge with a chunk of oily fish that sickened her. She had no method to clear herself — no towels, cleaning soap, toothpaste, shampoo or deodorant. She ripped T-shirts into a number of items: for her enamel, for her physique, for bathroom paper. The mattress was too small for her body, and her calves dangled over the sting. Her previous sports activities accidents flared up as she lay there, writhing in agony. The following morning, jail guards snickered exterior her cell. She caught some English blended with the Russian: “American,” after which, “basketball.” They flipped open the peephole and peered at her. “I’ve by no means been so soiled in my life,” she mentioned. The degradation would push her to ponder suicide. “I felt horrible.”
