Brittney Griner is only allowed out of her cell once a day and is struggling in prison, her lawyer has revealed.
“She is not yet absolutely convinced that America will be able to take her home,” Griner’s attorney, Alexandr Boykov, told the New York Times.
“She is very worried about what the price of that will be, and she is afraid that she will have to serve the whole sentence here in Russia.”
U.S. citizen Griner, 31, a two-time Olympic basketball gold medalist, was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison on Aug. 4 after pleading guilty to drug charges.
Her cellmates at Correctional Colony No.1 or IK-1, a pre-trial detention center, are both English speakers who are also in jail on drug charges. Prison rules dictate that inmates are only allowed to shower twice a week. It is located around an hour from Moscow.
“She suffers a lot without her family because she hasn’t seen them for so long and it’s very difficult to talk to them in any way,” Boykov told the newspaper.
“It’s like a movie for me. In no world would I have ever thought our president and a foreign nation president would be sitting down having to discuss the freedom of my wife,” Brittney’s wife Cherelle said in an interview with CBS’s Gayle King last week “It feels to me as if she is a hostage. … It terrifies me.”
Boykov described Griner saying: “She has not been in as good condition as I could sometimes find her in.”
According to the lawyer, Griner is reading a book about the Rolling Stones, Dostoyevsky’s book Demons and regularly plays a game that’s similar to Battleship.”
Boykov said that he last spoke to Griner on October 11. He said that she is worried about the conditions she will face in a new prison following her appeal.
