Brittney Griner is engaged on a memoir about Russian captivity

NEW YORK (AP) — Basketball star Brittney Griner says she’s able to share the “unfathomable” expertise of arrest and detention in Russia and is engaged on a memoir scheduled for spring 2024.

Griner was arrested at Moscow Airport final yr on drug costs and was detained for almost 10 months, a lot of it in jail. Her plight unfolded similtaneously Russia invaded Ukraine, additional escalating tensions between Russia and the US, which solely ended after she was freed in trade for infamous Russian arms seller Viktor Bout.

Griner, a WNBA All-Star with Phoenix Mercury, had flown to Moscow in February 2022 to return to UMMC Ekaterinburg, a Russian girls’s workforce she has performed for low season since 2014.

“That day (in February) was the start of an unfathomable interval in my life that I’m solely now in a position to share,” Griner mentioned in a press release launched Tuesday by Alfred A. Knopf.

“The primary purpose I traveled again to Russia for work that day was to make my spouse, household and teammates proud. After an extremely difficult 10 months of confinement, I’m grateful to have been rescued and to be residence once more. Readers will hear my story and perceive why I’m so grateful for the help from individuals world wide.”

Griner added that she additionally hopes her e-book would increase consciousness for different Individuals jailed overseas, together with Wall Road Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Russia final month and accused of espionage; Businessman Kai Li, who’s serving a 10-year sentence in China for revealing state secrets and techniques to the FBI; and Paul Whelan, a company safety government jailed in Russia on espionage costs. Across the time Griner was launched, Whelan criticized the US authorities for not doing sufficient to assist him.

Russia has been a preferred low season sport vacation spot for prime WNBA athletes, with some incomes salaries in extra of $1 million – almost 4 instances what they will earn as a WNBA base wage. Though Griner pleaded responsible to possessing canisters of hashish oil, Griner was nonetheless on trial beneath Russian regulation.

Griner’s memoirs are presently untitled and can finally be revealed in a youth version. Monetary phrases weren’t disclosed.

In Tuesday’s press launch, Knopf mentioned the e-book could be “intimate and transferring” and that Griner “discloses in vivid element her harrowing expertise of her wrongful imprisonment (as labeled by the State Division) and the issue of navigating the Byzantine Russian authorized panorama.” would system in a language she didn’t converse.”

“Griner additionally describes her stark and surreal time in a international jail and the terrifying elements of every day life in a girls’s penal colony,” reads the announcement. “On the coronary heart of the e-book, Griner highlights the private turmoil she skilled in the course of the almost ten-month ordeal and the resilience that carried her till her return to america final December.”

Griner, 32, is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a three-time All-American at Baylor College, a outstanding advocate for equal pay for ladies athletes, and the primary brazenly homosexual athlete to have an endorsement cope with Nike. She is the creator of a earlier e-book, In My Pores and skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court docket, revealed in 2014.

She re-signed with the Mercury in February and can play within the upcoming season, which runs from Could to September.

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