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Cherelle Griner revealed that her wife Brittney Griner has been struggling with her mental health as she serves her sentence in a Russian prison. Cherelle spoke about the few times she’s gotten to speak to her wife, during an interview on The View on Tuesday, November 1. Cherelle said Brittney had told her that she was trying to hold on to her memories of them together during her time there.
Cherelle explained that she’d only had a few chances to speak to the basketball player since she was sentenced. “We spoke only 3 times out of the 8 months since she’s been sentenced. The last time I spoke with her was a week before her appeal, and she said her mental is not there,” she said.
The WNBA player’s wife continued and revealed what Brittney had said to her the last time that they spoke, and it was heartbreaking. “She said, ‘I’m really trying to hold on to the last bit of you that I can remember. My mind is fading in here.’ It’s so disheartening to hear,” Cherelle said.
Before the end of her interview, Whoopi Goldberg asked Cherelle what fans could do to help, and she revealed that they’d set up a campaign to send her letters on WeAreBG.org. “Right now, getting her truly home is in the hands of a negotiation. You heard her. Her mental is not there. So for me, I just think words make a big difference,” she said. “We set up a letter-writing campaign just to remind her that she is freaking important and impossible to forget and just be her strength for her right now because she doesn’t have it.”
Brittney was found guilty and sentenced to 9 years in a Russian penal colony after she was arrested for possessing marijuana vape cartridges in February. The WNBA star and her lawyers had tried to appeal the decision but were rejected on October 25. After she was sentenced, her lawyer released a statement saying that Brittney was heartbroken. “She’s devastated. She is very upset and she’s honestly quite shocked, so she needs to digest what happened today,” they said.
When Sunny Hostin asked Cherelle about her reaction to the appeal, she explained that it was disappointing. “Honestly, it was just disheartening. It was a complete disbelief for me,” she said in a clip tweeted by the show. “This is just absurd. The crime and the punishment are disproportionate at its finest. There are people convicted of murder in Russia, who have a sentence way less than BG, and it absolutely makes no sense to me.”