China detained American basketball player for months in scant room with 'bug-infested rice', 'chicken anus'

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Basketball player Jeff Harper was detained in China

Harper and fiancee Victoria Villareal speak out on 'The Story'

A former Iowa Wesleyan University basketball star joined "The Story" Thursday after Chinese authorities detained him for several months in a featureless room where he recalled being fed only "bug-infested rice" and chicken offal.

Jeff Harper, now home in Idaho with his fiancee Victoria Villareal, was in Shenzhen – a city of 12 million near Macau and Hong Kong – for a January 2020 basketball tournament in hopes of landing an international contract, according to the Des Moines Register.

Harper had been detained by Chinese officials after intervening in a physical altercation inside a restaurant. Harper witnessed a man assaulting a woman and pushed the man out of the way to tend to the woman.

Chinese officials later told him the man had died, though no evidence was ever presented - and he was taken to a "residential surveillance area," host Martha MacCallum reported.

Harper told "The Story" that Chinese authorities never "physically harmed" him, but recounted being provided only a communal hole for a toilet and losing 40lbs of body weight because of the disgusting diet he was fed.

"It was depressing. You think ‘are they going to poison me’, ‘am I going home’. You never know what's going to happen. They can do anything they want to at any moment," he said.

"[They fed me] a handful of rice. Sometimes it had bugs in the rice," he said. "[And,] chicken ankles, knees, anus, raw chicken sometimes; It looked like it was baked but it wasn't quite fully baked."

Authorities, he added, told him he was being held for a few months for "the family's sake."

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"I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't have any activities to participate in. I couldn't watch TV or read any books. I didn't have any writing utensils," said Harper. "So my contentment was that I just watched the planes fly by and hoping that I could one day be on the plane."

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, his fiancee – Villareal – was back in the U.S. working tirelessly to get her soon-to-be husband free.

After working a full day, given the 15-hour time difference, Villareal told Fox News she would be up all night trying to retain and later work with a Chinese attorney as well as U.S. officials to free Harper. The language barrier was the other hardest part of her efforts, she said.

"They can do whatever they want to you. It's not like the U.S. law whatsoever. People would compare it to that but it's not," she said of the Chinese justice system.

Villareal enlisted the help of U.S. Sen. Michael Crapo, R-Idaho, as well, which was alluded to during the interview.

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The Register last year obtained correspondence between Crapo and a top U.S. consular official in Guangzhou, describing how the consulate was monitoring Harper's case "very closely" at the time.

"Jeff, we're glad that your nightmare is over, that you made it out of there safely," said host Martha MacCallum.

"You and me both," replied Harper with a smile.