When she arrived in Moscow, she stopped in customs earlier than her switch flight to Yekaterinburg, a smaller metropolis the place her Russian crew 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 folks out of line — all foreigners. “They have been singling out anyone that didn’t look Russian,” she stated. “I simply felt like they have been trying to find one thing.”
At first, once 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 gadgets, which she discovered uncommon. As quickly as she felt the cannabis-oil cartridge stowed in a zippered interior pocket in her backpack, her abdomen sank. Medical marijuana had been prescribed by a doctor in Arizona to deal with her continual ache, but it surely 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 the US, they usually have been all asleep.
Griner was instructed to attend whereas the agent took the cartridges for testing, alongside along 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 lookup one other phrase: advocat, that means “lawyer.” They pressured her to signal till she buckled, writing her title. 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 stated they discovered 0.7 grams of hashish oil whole 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, have been awake. Griner had been in a position to 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 have been for. Afterward, she was handcuffed and squeezed into one other tiny civilian automotive. For hours, she sat hunched over in ache as she was pushed throughout Moscow — a sightseeing tour from hell. The automotive lastly stopped at a neighborhood detention middle.
Griner was led to a cell and given some bedding for a discolored mattress. Her cellphone had been taken, however she had been allowed to maintain a small bag of private gadgets, which she full of some garments and her Sudoku guide. 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 solution to clear herself — no towels, cleaning soap, toothpaste, shampoo or deodorant. She ripped T-shirts into a number of items: for her tooth, for her physique, for lavatory paper. The mattress was too small for her body, and her calves dangled over the sting. Her outdated 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 stated. The degradation would push her to ponder suicide. “I felt horrible.”