Eddie Burke Jr./Facebook

Iditarod musher DQed, reinstated, now bowing out

The crazy lead-in to the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race set to start in downtown Anchorage on Saturday took another strange turn today when 2023 Rookie of the Year Eddie Burke Jr., who was disqualified amid charges of domestic assault only to be quickly reinstated, announced he was withdrawing from the race.

As is becoming something of a norm, Burke turned to Facebook to make the announcement.

“Due to recent events, I made the decision to lease out my race team to six individual mushers, competing in this year’s Iditarod,” he wrote there. “At the time, my main focus was letting dogs do what they love.”

All of this appears to have transpired in a very short period of time. Iditarod took to Facebook on Feb. 19 to announce the Anchorage musher’s disqualification for unspecified reasons.

Two days earlier, it had been reported here that the Kuskokwim Trail Sled Dog Race had earlier asked Burke to skip the Southwest Alaska event because he was awaiting trial in relation to a domestic assault with which he was charged in May 2022.

The charges, which the state’s legacy media had long ignored, were detailed in that story, but Burke was left unnamed because the story contained even more serious charges the director of the Planned Parenthood Advocates Alliance had made against former Iditarod champion Brent Sass from Eureka in a letter to the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race, which Sass had won five times.

Sass’s name was left out of the story because Rose O’hara-Jolley’s secondhand accusations from unnamed sources were potentially libelous, and a decision was made that it would be unfair to name Burke if Sass was not named.

The Iditarod outed Burke the next day with its announcement. Three days later, the state Department of Law announced it was dropping the charges against him because the woman whom Anchorage Police had found bloody and crying on Burke’s doorstep didn’t want to testify.

She’d since left Anchorage, rejoined her children on the Kenai Peninsula, and appeared to be settled into a happy, new relationship. Her reasons for deciding not to cooperate with the state prosecution are unknown, but by the time the charges were dropped, the Iditarod’s #metoo problem was turning into a public mess most reasonable people would want to avoid like the plague.

Burke’s quick change of plans

Despite only a few days passing between Burke’s disqualification and his reinstatement, he indicated on Facebook that he’d already committed many of his dogs to other mushers.

“After being reinstated,” he wrote, “it has been a challenge to gather my team back together and prepare for the race. This has not only been difficult for me but also the mushers I have made agreements with. After tough consideration, I have made the decision to withdraw from this year’s race and honor the agreements I have made with my fellow mushers.

“Over the past seven months, the dogs and I have put in over 2,000 miles on the trail and countless hours of preparation. Traveling to Nome is what this team deserves, even if that means traveling the trail without me.”

The decision, he said, was not easy, “but I am excited to watch my team travel the trail. There will always be another dog race and I never plan to be out of dogs. I look forward to cheering on my friends, running the few dogs left at the kennel, and most importantly, spending time with family.”

What he did not mention is that the move will also help him avoid the spotlight that would have invariably followed him up the trail with Iditarod now deep into #metoo issues that exploded with Sass going public to deny charges of sexual assault after threatening the Nome Nugget and other Alaska media with lawsuits if they reported those accusations.

Sass has not communicated with this website since questions were asked years ago about a claim dogs in one of his Quest teams collapsed because of genetic problems linked to their father, who had died in a dog fight after Sass parked his team along the Denali Highway to go relax in a lodge. There are no known genetic issues that would dogs more or less susceptible to being killed in a dogfight, and Sass’s Quest collapse had nothing to do with a dog fight.

Sass didn’t even lift his cone of silence to make threats here, and it didn’t matter. His name quickly emerged when the Iditarod disqualified him with the same say-nothing statement it used to disqualify Burke.

An exploding story

The floodgates then opened and the Anchorage Daily News (ADN), the state’s largest news organization, finally felt emboldened enough to report the story. It has since claimed to have found two, unidentified women who say they were sexually assaulted by Sass, although the newspaper reported “it took (one woman) time to realize what happened to her was wrong.”

The statement could have all kinds of meanings, but Sass, who lives on a remote homestead in the vast wilderness of Central Alaska north of Fairbanks, has in the past employed at least one teenage dog handler from Outside. A young female injected into the isolated world of Eureka, Alaska, might be easily manipulated into a sexual relationship only to later conclude that what happened to her is “wrong.”

But there could be a half dozen other possibilities. Sass has denied them all.

In a letter to the Iditarod Trail Committee, a copy of which he posted on his Facebook page, he wrote that “all of the accusations against me are completely false and have been fabricated to ruin my reputation and end my career.

“I have full intentions to fight these defamatory accusations to the fullest of my ability to clear my name and to continue running and racing sled dogs.”

The letter was posted on Friday. Since then, Sass has gone silent. He did not respond to yet another request for information from this website. It has, however, been revealed he did meet with media with which he had long been friendly – one of the reporters involved had previously proclaimed Sass “my favorite musher” – on Feb. 20, two days before the Iditarod announced his disqualification.

Alaska Public Media (APM) reported that in an interview then, Sass said, “I have never, ever, ever, ever, ever had nonconsensual sex with anyone. I am a respectful, upstanding human being.”

APM went on to quote an unidentified woman who described Sass raping her in a sauna and later, after “they were having consensual intercourse,” forcing her to have anal sex and slapping her sometimes during sex at other times.

“None of that happened,” Sass was quoted as saying. “I’m going to flat-out deny it. None of it happened. These are personal attacks. People just don’t want me in the sport anymore.”

A second woman was said to have described similar assaults by Sass, whose consensual intercourse, as reported, seemed to have a pattern of escalating into forced anal and oral sex.

The woman said she didn’t report the assaults because she had “little faith the result would be positive for me. I struggle with the fact that he is a quasi-public figure with a sunshiney, heroic reputation. I do want people to know the truth, but it’s not a truth that people want to hear, or are likely to accept.”

Heroes of Alaska

The story made no mention of how Sass gained this “sunshiney, heroic reputation,” but it is worth noting he has for years for unknown reasons been a favorite of the state’s legacy media.

When he pushed an Iditarod team so hard it collapsed in White Mountain in 2016, legacy reporters were sympathetic with KTVA-TV’s Jason Sear and John Thain reporting that “Sass’s team made their own decision to stop, something that might not have happened if Sass’s team had still included his former lead dog, Basin” – the dog killed by other dogs in the Sass team left unattended and unmonitored along the Denali.

When Sass the next year drove a team to collapse in the Quest, the ADN reported that “Eureka musher Brent Sass, whose career has been plagued with a series of mishaps, absorbed another Sunday,” a report which pushed former Iditarod and Quest musher Sebastian Schnuelle over the edge.

“I really do not understand how any musher, who has to be hauled off the trail with two dogs in the sled bag, is being praised,” he wrote on Facebook. “Some go as far as calling Brent a Champion for doing that. Seriously?”

Sass then summoned the ghost of Basin to save the day.

“I often carry Basin’s collar on my sled,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “He’s tattooed to my chest, and his name tag is sewn to the hood of my jacket. When I saw his boys crash like that, I feared the worst. I’m thankful that they’re happy and healthy today! I don’t know what to think about what looks like some sort of genetic issue….”

The state’s legacy media ate it up. They loved Sass.

When he called a friend to get advice on the stretch run to Iditarod victory in the 2022 race – a clear violation of the Iditarod’s rule against “outside assistance” – the legacy media ignored a rule violation as blatant as an NFL defensive back tackling a wide receiver seconds before a pass arrived.

‘I messaged my buddy, Mike Ellis, on my inReach who I had been in touch with for a good portion of the race, giving me updates here and there,’ Sass told APM. “He just said, ‘Dallas is 11 miles behind you and moving, so get your ass in gear. Get out of there.’ I’m thinking, ‘God, I gotta get out of here right now.'”

No mention was made of the regularity of Sass’s satellite contacts with Ellis despite the outside assistance rule clearly stating that “no planned help is allowed throughout the race.” Other media likewise ignored what Sass had done and hailed him as the hero of Iditarod 2022.

“Hours after Brent Sass and his dog team reached Front Street in Nome to become the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champion, he spoke about his relationship with his dogs, his passion for his lifestyle, and the harrowing events he overcame on his final run,” the ADN reported beneath a photograph of a smiling Sass, who told a great story about the difficult storm he and his team had survived and even provided the news outlet video of his dogs being blasted by blowing snow in the wind.

With that first Iditarod win following Sass’s list of Quest wins, he was officially another hero of Alaska. And to mark his arrival in the pantheon of Iditarod heroes, the race responded to his cheating by the next year by amending the “outside assistance” rule to stipulate that “no planned physical help is allowed.”