It seems years rather than weeks since US political prisoner Trevor Reed was released from Russia in a prisoner exchange. It also seems like years have passed since an American citizen, basketball superstar Brittney Griner, was arrested at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for allegedly possessing hash oil.

We now know what many of us believed all along – that Brittney Griner was, in the all-too-belated proclamation of the US government, “wrongfully detained.” In diplomatic terms, wrongfully detained is synonymous with politically detained, which is very close to what will inevitably happen soon – to call Brittney Griner hostage.

Since Griner’s detention began, I’ve done dozens of interviews in print, radio, TV, and the like, and I have a pretty clear view of how and why we got here.

As I wrote about six weeks ago, if we read between the lines of what is being said on mainstream and social media, we can extract three main reasons why the Griner situation is not getting the attention that she should be and would be if she was a different athlete.

The first reason is that Brittney Griner is not a high-profile athlete.

This is manifestly false. As I’ve been saying since the minute we learned she was arrested by the Russians, Griner was absolutely the most high-profile American athlete that Russia could have stopped as they prepared for their brutal invasion. from Ukraine.

The only other top athletes playing in or passing through Russia at that time were the very few American players in Russia’s top hockey league, the KHL. None are superstars in their sport like Griner is.

The second argument for why Griner isn’t getting the attention she should be getting is that she’s LGBTQ.

I argued that this was a reasonably good guess. It just seems like a straight athlete would get a lot more public attention and sympathy than Griner, in part, but not entirely, because of his sexual orientation. It’s a remarkably tough position to take in 2022, but Griner clearly doesn’t fit the mold of what many Americans see as this all-American athlete. That a person’s sexual or gender orientation should command sympathy from the American public for one of its top athletes is a shame, but here we are.

The third, most often cited reason why Brittany Griner receives less attention than another athlete in a similar situation is that she is black.

This argument carries little weight for me. Yes, it makes sense that compared to a top white athlete, some people simply care less about a black athlete. Again, this is a harsh analysis, but not unrelated to a lot of things happening in the country today.

But I think that’s a reductive argument that crumbles under the weight of the analogy I usually use on TV and radio shows about the Griner case — and that is, and if it was Kyrie Irving?

I like to use Kyrie Irving as an analogy because he’s a very controversial black athlete. Obviously, female NBA players don’t need to have second jobs in places like Russia, Turkey and China to make ends meet, like WNBA women do. But imagine that Kyrie Irving was traveling alone at the Moscow airport. If Irving had been arrested by the Russians, I can guarantee you it would be front page news not only in the sports section, but on the front pages of every major newspaper virtually every day. That just hasn’t been the case with Brittney Griner.

Every day I get asked where it goes from here. With Griner’s May 19 hearing delayed “by a month” (although at the time of this writing, no date has been set), I remained convinced of two things: that this goes in a worse place than we are now and painfully slowly progressing.

Regarding the first point, to maximize leverage on the United States, it is likely that Griner will end up somewhere like a Russian labor camp before returning to the United States. Although Russia does not respect the rule of law, it would not be legally or politically expedient to simply detain Griner in a Moscow jail or prison indefinitely. They need to escalate his situation to bring out the urgency of the matter for the US government.

But that won’t happen overnight. As I have also said from the beginning, the next court date will also be postponed, OR we will learn from a Russian TASS press release that Griner has been tried, found guilty on all charges and sentenced (see labor camp , above).

As for what each of us can do, my advice remains the same: keep talking about it. Make this Brittney as viral as Britney Spears was a year ago. Just as Britney Spears’ freedom from her guardianship was accelerated by the hashtag #FreeBritney, let’s say #FreeBrittney now.

It is much less banal than it seems. There’s no indication that the US government doesn’t want you to forget about Brittney Griner. As former hostage Jason Rezaian explained in a recent excellent Washington Post podcast, he always “calls BS” at these parties, saying we should keep detentions such as Griner out of the public spotlight. He advocates being as loud as possible about it, which is why I continue to do interviews on this issue as much as possible.

Ultimately, Brittney Griner will be a political prisoner until the United States and Russia can decide, in crass basketball terms, on a fair player swap. On Friday, we learned that the two sides may actually be in talks now for a trade involving Griner for notoriously convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout, aka the “dealer of death.”

Unless this can resurface and stay in the public spotlight, along with any pressure on the government, Britney Griner will not get the treatment she deserves as one of the greatest basketball players of her generation. That the huge disparity between how NBA and WNBA players are compensated laid the groundwork for her to be in that position is the stark reality facing those leagues today. Yet that pales in comparison to the uncertain reality Griner faces today in a Moscow prison.

Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aaron Solomon, JD, is the chief legal analyst for Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania and was elected to the Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world.