Did U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi successfully sue American basketball player Brittney Griner, preventing the athlete from participating in the Olympic Games? No, none of that is true: No credible media organization ever reported that, as of August 19, 2025. When Lead Stories checked specialized legal resources, those searches showed no confirmation that such a lawsuit ever existed.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on Facebook on August 14, 2025. It opened:
OH MY GOD! Pam Bondi has won her legal battle against Brittney Griner and will not have the chance to qualify for the Olympics, marking a huge victory for women's sport and facing the heaviest penalty in sports history for cheating... Full story below👇👇👇
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: screenshot taken of a post by the Today in America account on Facebook.com)
Brittney Griner (archived here) is an American basketball player who was imprisoned in Russia (archived here) and returned home on December 8, 2022 (archived here) in a high-profile prisoner swap between the two countries.
The article (archived here) shared in the comment section below the post continued:
The coυrtroom drama, which had captυred пatioпal atteпtioп for moпths, reached its coпclυsioп late yesterday wheп a federal jυdge rυled iп favor of Boпdi, whose legal team sυccessfυlly argυed that Griпer had kпowiпgly violated competitive fairпess regυlatioпs iп iпterпatioпal competitioп. The decisioп effectively eпds Griпer's shot at joiпiпg Team USΑ for the 2025 Olympic Games iп Paris -- aпd poteпtially damages her legacy forever.
However, contrary to the claim, searches on Google (archived here) and Yahoo (archived here) didn't show any news reports about the purported lawsuit.
Lead Stories searched specialized resources such as Google Scholar Case Law (archived here), Court Listener (archived here) and PACER, but found no evidence Bondi has taken legal action against Griner.
(Source: screenshot of the search result page on Pacer.uscourts.gov)
Academic databases allowing searches across multiple types of resources, such as CLIO and ProQuest, utilized by a Lead Stories reporter, did not produce any proof of the lawsuit's existence, either.
Furthermore, the article claimed that what was at stake before the supposed court ruling was Griner's participation in the Paris Olympics. But that event had already concluded by the time of that article's publication on August 14, 2025: The Paris summer Olympics took place between July 26 and August 11, 2024 (archived here). Italy will host the next Games in February 2026 (archived here), but basketball is not on the list of the Olympic winter sports.
More importantly, Griner could not have been precluded from participation in the Games in which the athlete had already participated (archived here) and won a gold medal (archived here).
In an apparent attempt to avoid detection, some letters of the English alphabet were changed to similarly looking symbols from other languages. For example, the letter "n" became "п" while the letter "u" turned into "υ".
A search for the phone number listed in the About section of the Facebook page (archived here) that published the claim did not lead to a professional media organization -- it was linked (archived here) to a nail salon in California, while the page's managers, according to the Transparency Page, were based in Vietnam:
(Source: screenshot of the Page Transparency tab on the Today in America page on Facebook.com)
