'We're on our knees': Family continues to push government to help bring Marc Fogel home

The family now has three goals, and each one leads to the next.

Force those in power to say Marc Fogel’s name.

Have the U.S. State Department designate him as wrongfully detained.

Bring the Oakmont teacher home from Russia, where he has been held for nearly three years.

“We don’t think they’ve made the effort to get Marc out, and, as you know, he’s as important as anyone else on the planet,” said Fogel’s mother, Malphine.

On Thursday, reporters gathered at Malphine Fogel’s home in Butler for a news conference. Two days earlier, the 95-year-old woman filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State and its secretary, Antony Blinken, demanding the government treat her son’s case the same as they have others, including WNBA star Brittney Griner.

For more than an hour, Mrs. Fogel and the attorneys helping her spoke about Marc’s plight — his incarceration in a maximum security penal colony about five hours away from Moscow, the lack of assistance they’ve received from the U.S. government, and how the American public needs to work harder to make his case more well-known.

Mrs. Fogel is particularly frustrated, she said, with the Biden administration. The president has never publicly said her son’s name. She is mad, too, that the first lady has not gotten involved.

“I am so disappointed because I thought if Jill Biden knew about these circumstances, she would have made a little bit of an effort to support a fellow teacher,” Mrs. Fogel said. “Teaching was all-important to Marc, and he gave his heart and soul to it.”

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Fogel, 62, was arrested on Aug. 14, 2021, at the Moscow airport, where he had just arrived to begin his 10th and final year teaching history at the Anglo-American School.

He was called out of line at the airport and his luggage was searched. Authorities found seven grams of medical marijuana — prescribed to Fogel after a number of spinal surgeries.

Fogel was imprisoned, convicted following a June 2022 trial and ordered to serve 14 years in prison.

“He doesn’t want pity,” Mrs. Fogel said. “I think he feels he has to get out of this himself.”

In the three years since her son was arrested, she said, the family has done all it can to help him. They have lobbied members of Congress and worked with attorneys. There have been documentary films and art exhibits. Fogel’s students have written letters, and op-eds have been published.

But they believe none of it will have an impact without the wrongful detention designation from the State Department.

Throughout the news conference, Mrs. Fogel and Sasha Phillips, an attorney helping the family, repeatedly referenced Griner, noting that the circumstances of her arrest were nearly identical to Fogel’s.

Griner was arrested in February 2022 and declared wrongfully detained by the State Department less than three months later. Fogel has been held for nearly three years, and the U.S. government has not applied the label to him.

“Marc and our family are not being given the same rights and protections as Brittney and her family,” Mrs. Fogel said.

There has never been any explanation.

In Griner’s case, the Biden administration spoke to her family, and those efforts sustained them, Mrs. Fogel said.

“We have never had contact, and we need that sustenance just like they do,” she said. “Most importantly, the Biden administration has made it very clear that Marc has no value to America, and therefore, Russia is not motivated to release him. He needs to be as well known as Brittney Griner, even though he’s not a basketball player.”

Griner was released in December 2022 in a prisoner exchange with the United States for a Russian arms dealer, Viktor Bout, who was serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison.

Receiving the designation of wrongfully detained provides numerous resources to the family of the person being held, including funding for travel, higher-level communications and legal support, as well as medical resources.

“It is financially and mentally crippling to regular people like us,” Mrs. Fogel said of their fight.

She also described how Fogel spends his days in prison. He is permitted to walk to a small structure at the facility that is used as a church. He sits among the altar and candles and prays a couple of times each day.

He also was given a 6-foot by 6-foot patch of garden to tend.

Fogel planted carrots, turnips and other root vegetables. But there’s no water source nearby, and, because of his relentless pain, he is unable to get water to the plants to care for them, his mother said.

He’s been permitted to have books by Russian authors, and his sister sent him some. He has read them multiple times. His family also sent him wool socks and ibuprofen, which he eventually receives, his mother said.

Fogel also started an English tutoring group for some of the young Russian men also incarcerated, Mrs. Fogel said. But prison officials eventually shut it down.

Fogel’s sister, Anne, who attended the news conference via video, said her brother should be appreciated for the service he has provided his country in teaching children of diplomats around the world for decades.

“His students are incredibly prepared for the world,” she said. “Because of teachers like my brother, they understand the complexities and nuances of world politics. He has given a great deal — far more than he’s recognized for.”

The family’s fight and her brother’s circumstances, Anne Fogel said, are overwhelming.

“We’re on our knees,” she said. “We are on our knees.”

“We have to depend on the State Department and our leaders to do something,” Malphine Fogel added. “We can’t do anything more.”