Brittney Griner Says She Considered Suicide During First Weeks of Russian Imprisonment: ‘I Felt Like Leaving Here So Badly’

WNBA star Brittney Griner says that during the early days of her Russian imprisonment, she felt like taking her own life.

In an interview With ABC’s Robin Roberts that aired Wednesday, days before the release of her memoir Coming Home, Griner describes the physical and emotional turmoil she went through after being arrested by Russian authorities in 2022 for attempting to travel with a marijuana-infused vape cartridge in her luggage.

“I wanted to take my life more than once in the first weeks … I felt like leaving here so badly,” Griner told Roberts.

The WNBA star went on to say that one of the reasons she didn’t commit suicide was that she feared Russian authorities wouldn’t return her body to her family.

“The mattress had a huge blood stain on it,” Griner revealed as she described the conditions of her prison. “They give you these thin two sheets, so you’re basically laying on bars. The middle of my shin to my feet stuck through the bars, which — in prison, you don’t really want to stick your leg and arms through bars, because someone go up and grab it, twist it, break it and that’s what was going through my mind.”

Griner goes on to describe being given only one roll of toilet paper for an entire month and being given toothpaste that was so past the expiration date that she used it to kill mold on the prison walls.

Griner was aided during her imprisonment by an inmate she calls Alana, who helped her through the dark times. And times would get darker before they got better. After being transferred to a prison called IK-2, the weather got so bad that she had to cut her dreads to prevent them from freezing.

“We had spiders above my bed making nests,” Griner explained. “My dreads started to freeze. They would just stay wet and cold, and I was getting too sick. You gotta do what you gotta do to survive.”

Despite being sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison, Griner was released in December of 2022 in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. Griner had hoped that another American imprisoned in Russia, former Marine Paul Whelan, would also be released.

She describes her shock as she boarded the plane home and realized Whelan wasn’t on it.

“I walked on and didn’t see him, maybe he’s next. Maybe they will bring him next,” she said. “They closed the door, and I was like, are you serious? You’re not going to let this man come home now.”

Griner has urged U.S. officials to do all they can to bring Whelan home.