WNBA star Brittney Griner found depths she did not know existed while she was locked up in a Russian prison, she recounted in a new interview.
Griner served 10 months in a Russian prison in 2022 after being caught with drugs in her luggage at a Moscow airport. She was later swapped by the Biden administration for a Russian arms dealer.
She recently spoke about her time in prison on Cam Newton’s “Funky Friday” podcast.
“I had a cellmate in the very beginning. I thought something was off with her,” Griner said, according to Fox News.
“She acted like a child, but she was a grown woman, but she very much acted like an adolescent child. 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. And that’s who they had me in a cell with,” she said.
Fellow inmates handed out a dose of retribution to the woman, Griner said.
“There’s not a lot of torturing from inmates with girls on the women’s side,” Griner said.
“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,” she said.
Griner said murder and drug offenses were the most common reasons women were in prison, saying she was upset that inmates were not separated by offenses because she did not want to be associated with the cellmate who sold videos.
Would you have done the Griner prisoner swap with Russia?
Wayment! Brittney Griner shared a shocking story about how she had to share a cell with another inmate who displayed odd behaviors. Her experience happened following her detainment in Russia in 2022. (🎥:@funkyfriday) ✍🏾:#TSRStaffJR pic.twitter.com/u4ubm6AlVO
— TheShadeRoom (@TheShadeRoom) July 19, 2025
“I didn’t really sleep at night ‘cause she be over there singing and doing weird stuff at night,” Griner said.
“The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper. That was the moment where I just felt less than a human,” Griner told ABC last year.
Speaking to ESPN about a book she released last year, Griner said that being imprisoned “was my lowest moment. Like, that’s when I really contemplated suicide as well. It was degrading.”
She repeated that she “didn’t feel human.”
Griner added that “you just have nothing and you’re just thrown scraps and you’re just a laughing stock, and once you make it to the penal colony, you just work. Like, you’re a labor slave at that point. Like, sun up, sun down, sickness. Don’t care. You go to work. Like, work till you drop.”
She claimed that Russia spied upon her, citing two cellmates she had — Olya and Alena.
“When me and Alena would be talking, Olya would be lying down, trying to act like she was asleep. And then she would perk up and sit up. She would get up and just watch us talk. And I’m like, ‘Oh, what? You were sleeping? What are you doing?’” she said.
“Or, when we would get done talking, she would start writing in her book. Subtle. And one day, I saw her slip a note to the guard, and I was just like, ‘Oh, Okay. You’re a spy,’” she said.
She said the other inmate, Alena, “went through her stuff, she had, like, written down everything we were talking about, which wasn’t anything because I knew better than to talk about anything personal or crazy.”
She said the guards summoned Alena one day, adding, “They were trying to get her to write stuff down about me, too. She told them no. And they wrecked our whole room right after that, that same night.”
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