A Russian prison is bleak:
That was life in the gray zone. Most everything was negotiable; you just had to find the right price.
So write Brittney Griner and Michelle Burford in Coming Home, the bestselling new memoir about Griner’s ten months as a hostage in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Griner was describing the negotiations she witnessed within the prison economy, as inmates bribed corrupt guards to bend or break the rules. But she may as well have been describing her own harrowing experience as a captive and political pawn.
Griner was arrested in Russia in February 2022, a mere seven days before Russia’s hostile invasion of Ukraine. Ten months later, after she was tried and convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced to nine years of hard labor in a Russian penal colony, Griner was released in a high-profile prisoner swap for Viktor Bout, nicknamed the “merchant of death.” Her story epitomizes the growing phenomenon of hostage diplomacy – when autocratic governments use their criminal justice systems to take foreigners hostage.
I tracked this case closely
For 10 months in 2022, I followed every development in Griner’s detention, detailing public opinion about her case, the Biden administration’s announcement that Griner had been “wrongfully detained,” and lessons learned from her release. But I had so much more to learn from reading Griner’s raw, revealing new memoir, which highlights a side of hostage taking that few could possibly imagine from the outside.
The book foregrounds Griner’s heart-wrenching tale of her arrest, detention, and eventual prisoner swap. It’s a book filled with Griner’s love – for her wife Cherelle, her parents, and siblings. She details warm friendships forged with her lawyer Alex Boykov and cellmate Alena, who helped her get through the lowest lows of captivity. And she shares the unexpected struggles she faced after returning home, where the physical and emotional scars of captivity leave her not yet entirely free.
Here are just some of the revelations that are sticking with me from Brittney Griner’s riveting new memoir, Coming Home.
Even by Russian standards, Griner’s case was a sham
Russia does not have a free or fair criminal justice system. It was little surprise that in May 2022, the U.S. Department of State designated Griner as “wrongfully detained,” indicating that the Biden administration and its special presidential envoy for hostage affairs would attempt to intervene to win her release. Prisoners receive this designation when the U.S. government believes that an American citizen is being held by a foreign government for leverage, or treated unfairly in a problematic criminal justice system.
The details in Griner’s memoir portray even more cynical, Kafkaesque treatment than we knew publicly at the time. From the moment her bags were searched, she suspected she was being singled out. The group of airport security guards called as witnesses in her trial submitted terse written statements, did not show up, tampered with evidence, or lied in court. The Russian courts treated her differently from Russian prisoners, who typically received a short sentence or fine for similar crimes. Instead, Griner received a near-maximum sentence for the compound charges of drug possession and the international smuggling of what Russia called a “significant amount” of narcotics.
Russian imprisonment is really, truly awful
Griner and her team put on a brave face to the outside world during her detainment, never complaining about the cruel or inhumane treatment in captivity. But Griner’s treatment was indeed abominable across the Russian jails, prisons, and camps she experienced in her 10 months as a Russian hostage. The book details the repugnant conditions (filth, disease, inedible rations); the dehumanization (guards who frequently made her strip and gawked at her naked body); the relentless interrogations to relegate her to the psych ward due to her sexuality and alleged “drug problem.”
Throughout 2022, no one would have claimed that Russian imprisonment is a walk in the park. But Griner’s memoir is a stark reminder of the horrors she faced as the rare American woman to serve in Russian penal colony IK-2. It also tells us more about the horrors Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich and other Americans wrongfully detained in Russia currently face.
Identify matters in the battle for public sympathy
White, female hostages (and especially young, blonde girls) receive far more attention than do other victims of abduction. Scholars call this phenomenon the “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” It’s one of the factors that explains the variation in media coverage for victims of hostage-taking violence.
Griner’s advocates, led masterfully by her longtime agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, were hyper aware that Griner – black, gay, and nearly 7 feet tall – might not evoke widespread sympathy from the American public. With this disparity in mind, they crafted a public relations message meant not to emphasize how Griner is special, but how she is “one of us.” The #WeAreBG campaign explicitly universalized her plight, arguing that she deserved help – not for her basketball star status or the color of her skin, but the color of her passport.
Publicity for hostages is a double-edged sword
When someone is taken hostage abroad, their family must make a difficult and important decision: Should they “go public” about their loved one’s ordeal? Griner’s memoir highlights the very real costs and benefits of publicity.
On the one hand, Coming Home suggests that publicity “works” to get White House attention. The morning after an interview aired in which Cherelle Griner expressed frustration that she hadn’t heard from the White House, President Biden called her directly, expressing his commitment to bringing Griner home, and letting Cherelle know he was “proud” of her advocacy. Throughout Griner’s imprisonment, U.S. officials told Cherelle and Colas that staying loud “helps the president make a hard decision” – demonstrating that there is public support for making painful concessions.
On the other hand, such publicity also strengthens the hostage taker’s hand. Biden told Cherelle privately about the downsides of publicity. The White House was not the only audience for advocacy work on Griner’s behalf: Anything Cherelle said publicly, the Kremlin heard, too. Putin would relish the domestic pressure on Biden and use it to drive up the cost of recovery.
Griner’s guilty plea was personal and strategic
Griner was accused of international narcotics smuggling – a trumped-up charge clearly disproportionate to her possession of 0.7 grams of cannabis oil. So exaggerated was the charge, Griner writes, that officials in the U.S. government urged her to plead “not guilty.” (A “not guilty” plea would also align better with the administration’s determination that Griner was “wrongfully detained.”)
Still, Griner pleaded guilty during her July 2022 trial outside of Moscow. Her memoir suggests that her decision was both personal and strategic. On the personal side, Griner emphasizes that she wanted to take responsibility for an honest mistake. She suffered relentless guilt during and after her imprisonment, blaming herself and dwelling on the “what ifs.”
But her guilty plea was also strategic. In past and ongoing cases of Russian hostage diplomacy, the Kremlin has refused to negotiate with the U.S. government until after Russian courts convicted and sentenced American hostages for their “crimes.” By entering a guilty plea, Griner and her legal team hoped that they would expedite the process, hastening the start of the real negotiations.
A final point: Griner’s memoir suggests that guilty pleas can be one way to allow hostage-taking countries to save face. In November 2022, Griner wrote a personal letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin, personally requesting his mercy and pardon. Her letter acknowledges and apologizes for breaking the laws of Russia, a “beautiful country” she had considered her second home for seven years. The letter emphasized a shared love and respect for sports and appealed to Putin’s pride, calling him “the only person on the planet [with] the authority to help me.”
Coming home is only the beginning
In my research and policy engagement on hostage taking, I have had the opportunity to speak to dozens of former hostages and their family members. As anyone will tell you, coming home is wonderful, but it is far from the end of their captivity story. Instead, it marks the beginning of a long and winding road to real freedom.
Griner’s memoir details the physical, mental, and emotional damage of her ten months in captivity that plagued her long after she returned. After the initial high of her release wore off, she began experiencing depression, anxiety, and severe post-traumatic stress. Like every hostage I’ve ever known, Griner suffered persistent nightmares of being back in captivity.
Beyond these common hurdles, Griner also dealt with racist vitriol and threats to her physical safety. The vile hate mail poured in, and online trolls leaked her home address, necessitating that she hire personal security and leave her home.
Small acts of kindness mean a great deal
The book is rife with details of pain and trauma. Nevertheless, Griner also shares the rare bright moments of her ordeal when others’ humanity shone through. After the shock of her sentencing, she found comfort in the kindness and compassion expressed by fellow inmates, and even some guards. Some prisoners helped out by translating everything from guards’ orders to the Russian soap operas playing on the prison TV. In the penal colony, a fellow prisoner sewed a special uniform to fit Griner’s 6-ft-9 frame.
People often ask me what they can do to get involved in supporting hostages and their families. Griner’s memoir really brought home for me the value in reaching out. She points out the letters she received while in prison were a joy and a lifeline in an otherwise dark time.
Dozens of Americans are currently held hostage abroad. Writing to them as they languish in faraway detention reminds them that they haven’t been forgotten.