Following Karelina’s arrest, her boyfriend Chris Van Heerden shared more insight into her trip to Russia, where she went to see her 90-year-old grandmother. The couple celebrated New Year’s together last year in Istanbul and while Van Heerden flew back to California, his girlfriend decided to make a detour.

“She was like, ‘I’m going to be fine, it’s good. I’m Russian, I’m good,'” he told NBC Los Angeles last February. “This is also eating away at me a little bit because I bought that plane ticket.”

He said that Karelina faced issues the moment she arrived in the country, saying that she had been detained at the airport. She was released, according to Van Heerden, but Russian authorities held onto her phone. They decided to communicate through her mom’s phone for three weeks until two days before her flight back to L.A.

“She said, ‘I’m going to go in a few hours. I’m going to go pick up my phone,'” he said. “It was nighttime here so I said, ‘I’ll speak to you in a couple hours because I’m going to go to bed’, and then that was the last we spoke.”

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