The Iditarod board voted unanimously on Thursday to disqualify former champion Brent Sass after allegations made in November and recent questions from Alaska Public Media, the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica. Sass has denied the claims.
Brent Sass in 2015. A letter from an official at Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates Alaska said “multiple survivors” alleged sexual assault by Sass over the course of a decade.
“You are giving the accusers exactly what they are hoping for and in the end this hurts the actual victims of sexual abuse and the sport of mushing,” he wrote. He did not respond to requests for comment after he was disqualified.was the second competitor to be disqualified this week by the race’s board. It said on Monday it would not allow musher Eddie Burke Jr.
The second woman told the news organizations that Sass hit and slapped her during sex without her consent, forced her to perform oral sex on multiple occasions and forced her to have intercourse in one case after she said no. She provided the newsrooms with a letter from the Interior Alaska Center for Non-Violent Living dated Dec.
“To be clear, this board committee is in no position to be an arbiter of evidence or to decide disputes regarding a musher’s conduct. The Iditarod lacks the resources to conduct such an investigation and process, nor is it an appropriate role for the Iditarod to play.” A board member for the Fairbanks-based Yukon Quest Alaska said she resigned after learning about how the race was handling the accusations.
The woman provided the news organizations a copy of a journal entry dated during the time she worked for Sass saying he suddenly slapped her in the face while they were having sex. The former dog handler said she was motivated to write the sworn statement in order to warn others, perhaps young women thinking about working for Sass.
Another one of the victim’s friends, Melanie Richter, told the newsrooms that the former dog handler told her in roughly the same time period that she had experienced nonconsensual sex with Sass in the years before she and Richter met. In the email, the woman told her relative that Sass during sex “choked, hit, bit and otherwise caused me a lot of physical pain, all without prior consent, or any discussion on these activities.”
Sass denied the second woman’s allegations when presented with her statements to the newsrooms and a description of her 2016 email and the shelter’s letter.“I am being tore apart by this,” he added, “because of these false accusations.”The second woman told a relative in the 2016 email that Sass warned her that “if I said anything to anyone in Fairbanks that was bad about him he would ruin me.”“If they felt that way,” Sass said “I would tell them, ‘Tell somebody.
He wrote that one longtime volunteer told the race she would “have nothing to do” with it if Sass participated this year. He told the board he would withdraw if the board decided, upon further consideration, it still wanted him to do so. “‘We stand by you Brent,’ is basically what his statement was,” Sass said. “‘We stand by you and we’re not going to pursue this in any way.’”
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