Brittney Griner’s experience in a Russian penal colony was harrowing.
During a conversation on Cam Newton’s Funky Friday podcast, Griner shared what life was like in the Russian detention facility, pointing to a specific incident that led to many sleepless nights.
She explained that inmates weren’t separated according to their crimes, and that most inmates were incarcerated for murder or drugs.
“I had a cellmate in the very beginning. I thought something was off with her. She acted like a child, but she was a grown woman, but she very much acted like an adolescent child,” Griner recalled at around the 1:48:30 hour mark. “And then she had burn marks all over herself, and I found out after the fact that she was selling videos online of her husband and her child—together.”
Newton looked stunned as Brittney revealed that the burn marks were from the other inmates.
“There’s not a lot of torturing from inmates with girls on the women’s side. But if you in there for something like that, yeah, you going to get tortured. And they would put their cigarettes out on her and make her sleep at the door, too.”
The Atlanta Dream center said she was “mad” when she found out because she didn’t know inmates weren’t separated based on their crimes.
“I’m like, ‘Well I don’t want them to think that I’m in here for this crime. Don’t associate me with that one,’” she said. “I didn’t really sleep at night ‘cause she be over there singing and doing weird stuff at night.”
The 34-year-old was detained on Feb. 17, 2022 at the Moscow airport when authorities found two vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her luggage. She spent 293 days in a Russian detention facility before she was released as part of a prisoner exchange and returned to the U.S. in December 2022.