“So your position is hell hath no wrath like a woman scorned,” he said.  “That’s your….”

At which point, Sass cut in to say, “Yeah,” and Hayes continued with “that’s your position.”

“That’s basically it,” Sass says. “I mean, I said. I’ll admit to all of that. I, I, I put the dogs first.”

Hayes then cut Sass off again to ask him what he’d say to the women if they were listening, and the answer was this:

“Why did you wait 10 years? Why were you my friend? These people were like all my friend from the time where all these accusations were said to happen, they continued to be my friend. I was talking with these people throughout that time. And as I. because, as I moved to the Bush (rural Alaska) and I became more, uh, secluded and focused on my career, I definitely lost touch with a lot of these people. And so I wasn’t in touch with these people for a long time.

‘But why then, right after I start having success, do you come out and say that all of this happened? Like that, it’s kind of a red flag, right, to anybody who can see anything? It’s you can’t wait 10 years, and how can you hold this in?”

This question, unfortunately for Sass, has one logical answer, and that is that it took years for the various women to connect, engage in conversations in which they unburdened themselves about their experiences with Sass, and finally ask, “Does he treat all women this way?”

But to let Sass continue with his thoughts on women finally saying something about his behavior:

“…How is this justice? This isn’t justice. Like, yeah, you, you ruined my life. You took my career. You took my entire career. You took everything that I did for the last 20 years, and it got evaporated basically in, man, the time span of three months. My entire career and my reputation was shot because of mainly the people on social media who spread that around.

“And then when these allegations came out that are completely false and completely madeup stories, it, it, it, there was nothing I could defend. I didn’t do it. That’s all I could say. So there wasn’t anybody to push back (on).”

The theme that there was nothing that Sass could do, that he had no remedy against false accusations, runs through the rambling, 1-hour and 8-minute interview almost from beginning to end. This is classic Sass playing the part of the victim, sans any of the shedding of tears for dramatic effect, for which he became famous in Alaska mushing circles.

But the claim that there was nothing he could do is a fiction.

O’hara-Jolley was publicly attached to the accusations from the start. There was nothing to stop Sass from filing a defamation suit against her. In the interview, he blames Planned Parenthood for failing to shut the woman up and calls her a “rogue employee.”

But O’hara-Jolley wasn’t a rogue employee of Planned Parenthood. She was a woman associated with an advocacy group doing what people associated with advocacy groups do, which only made her more vulnerable to a defamation suit because of the perception that she was starting her attacks on Sass from an already biased position rather than from the neutral one from which a media organization might start.

And even then, at least one lawyer suggested Sass might have had a case against the more valuable targets of the Anchorage Daily News, Propublica and Alaska Public Media, which arrived late to the Sass story but nonetheless suggested they deserved the credit for getting him banned from the Iditarod.

From a publicity standpoint, if Sass wanted a battle to clear his name, suing them would have focused a huge amount of attention on the Sass affair. But Sass didn’t sue anybody.

Why not?

Well, the big problem with lawsuits is that they expose plaintiffs to a process called “discovery,” which means the defendants get to go dig around in all your closets looking for dirty laundry.

God knows that if you’re an Alaska musher, you don’t want this going on because of the case psychologists have made for a connection between animal abuse and spousal abuse. And there is no telling what a deep dive into most kennels in the state might find.

Many are run by people who might be described as having a more “livestock view” of dogs than a “pet view” of dogs. And Sass, having been a media darling for most of his career, surely recognized that after his fans at the Daily News and Alaska Public Media turned on him, the wise thing to do would be to avoid giving them more ammunition.

Interestingly enough, they don’t get mentioned at all in Sass’s chat with Hayes, wherein the musher points the finger at “haters” and blames his downfall entirely on “social media,” the favorite whipping boy of these times.

Hayes, for his part, joins in to complain that social media shouldn’t be the courtroom for issues like this while on YouTube, a social media platform, being the courtroom trying to vindicate Sass in a long and rambling interview that starts with nearly 40 minutes of mushers talking about mushing, and Hayes expressing his admiration for Sass.

Then the interviewer finally gets to “uh, a really dark turn. Um, there were allegations, I guess, uh, multiple allegations of sexual misconduct were made against you.”

Sass reveals some news there. Or at least makes a claim that is new.

He says that well before the O’hara-Jolley email and letters became public, he had a meeting with Iditarod, which “formed a panel, um, from their board members and I had a video chat with Iditarod, and I told them my truths and (that) the letter was written by a person named Rose O’Hare….(and) they did their investigation. They had an interview with Rose as well. She could give them no information. She could give them nothing more than she wrote in this letter. And, uh, like a week and a half later, two weeks later, they closed it with insufficient (evidence).

“They closed the case and said that these letters have no sufficient evidence of any wrongdoing, and we are closing this accusation. So it got closed out at that point. The Copper Basin (300 Sled Dog Race) and the K200 (Sled Dog Race) all fell in line with them, and the Yukon Quest was just like, ‘Yeah, if there’s no charges and these, we can’t legitimize these accusations,’ and everybody, it kind of just died off a little bit at that point.”

The Iditarod’s handling of the case, at that point, appears perfectly in line with its “investigation” into former champ Dallas Seavey’s dog doping, which was put aside with the Iditarod declaring Seavey innocent despite doing no investigation whatsoever into how the drugs got into his dogs.

This could be described as a “declare-the-case-settled-and-bury-it” approach.

Given the Seavey history, Sass had a valid reason to believe he was in the clear when the by far biggest sled dog race in the state suggested it was going to ignore O’hara-Jolley unless law enforcement filed charges.

“But then in December, like, uh, you know…I’m like going as hardcore as I can go (in training),” Sass said, “I’m putting my head down. This isn’t stopping me because there I, I am, innocent, and I know that, and so I have 100 percent confidence to just keep plowing forward.”

How innocent or guilty Sass was, we may never know. But he did have reason to expect “100 percent confidence” against prosecution.

As the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women has observed, “intimate partner sexual assaults pose significant challenges for prosecutors. In order to successfully prosecute these cases, prosecutors must overcome cultural bias, victim blaming, and domestic and sexual violence myth acceptance. Further, they must persuade judges and juries that intimate partner sexual assaults are serious cases that significantly impact the safety and well-being of the community.”

And the one thing district attorneys hate, here in Alaska and everywhere, is bringing a high-profile case to court only to lose. In Alaska, a sexual assault case against Sass would qualify as high-profile, and the kinds of accusations being levied here have some inherent grays:

“How aggressively did you protest? Did you say no? Did you ever have previous sexual activities during which you said ‘no,’ but didn’t mean no? Did you fight to get away?”

There’s a very real possibility a jury hearing a case like this might decide that, “yes, this was bad,” but then vote that it wasn’t bad enough to qualify as an illegal sexual assault. And with the Alaska media having for years portrayed Sass as Mr. Wonderful?

When Sass drove a dog team so hard it ran out of gas in White Mountain in 2016, he cried, and Alaska’s mainstream media cried with him. When he the next year pushed a Quest team so hard that two dogs toppled and the rest of the team struggled so badly that he had to use a satellite communication device to call for rescue, it was much the same story.

Somehow, Sass always seemed to come out of these disasters as the good guy who stopped only because he was so concerned for his dogs. This portrayal was so well established that by 2024, one of the women involved in the sexual assault accusations told public media that she didn’t report her sexual assault when it happened 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.”

Now, not to defend Alaska DAs per se, but if you’re one of them watching the Sass affair unfold in both journalistic and social media, it wasn’t hard to see what was going to happen. Sass’s career as a dog musher was about to implode. He was going to be punished.

And if you did anything, it would be unlikely to change that and might make the situation worse. An announcement that a law enforcement investigation was underway was just going to lead some to conclude that there was a chance the accusations against Sass were false, and that would be sure to fire up the “innocent until proven guilty” brigade.

There’s no telling what happens after that. So, if you’re in the legal system, and you believe Sass is indeed guilty, and you want him punished in some way, the best thing to do is just shut up and let this all unfold, as it did.

Boom

Let Sass tell the rest of the unfolding story:

“Um, December 12th, the K300 is the first contact I had with the K300 over this,” he told Hayes.

The K300 is the Bethel-based Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race. It is the second-largest sled dog race in the state and a high-profile event.

“They had not gotten in touch with me,” Sass said, “but after that Iditrod dropped it, I just figured, you know, that’s the biggest race in the sport. Most of these other races don’t have the capabilities to do any major research or anything like that. And so, they’re going to probably follow suit with Iditarod.

“But they did not. And they wrote me a big, long letter about how, you know, this (is) the villages, and it, sexual assault, is a problem in the villages. And I understood that 100 percent.

“I get it. But I, but the facts are is that I had run that race four times. I had been in the villages. I had made communication with all them. I had made friends with all them. They all knew my reputation.

“I had no prior history of any of this. And I just pleaded my case that way, you know, like this is where we’re at. How can you take this at face value when there’s no nothing backing it up? And that is where things got frustrated, because all sort of justice went out the door. There was no, no level of fairness involved.

“And even the, the thing that frustrates me the most is like the K300 is run by a lawyer and they’re bound by the law. And in the end, they just threw the law out the window. I mean, in their statement, they said, ‘We do not have the ability or the desire to investigate this anymore. So, we’re not going to rush to judgment.’

“But by asking me to withdraw, (they were) rushing to judgment. You’re, you’re, you’re accusing me of being guilty before any reason of…Yeah. And, and let’s, let’s I mean, let’s be clear. Um, first of all, you know, to acknowledge the fact that, you know, if a woman is abused, it is hard for them to come forward. It is hard to make, you know, these big public statements and get into the public eye.

“….But that said, um, you know, our whole system of being able to, um, to address the accusations to, um, confront their accuser, and that there is a presumption of innocence and until proven guilty that you’re innocent until proven guilty. Not guilty until proven innocent.”

The problem here, of course, is that Sass is confusing the social system with the legal system, which is designed to prevent the government from imprisoning people unless a crime can be proven. An organization like the Kuskokwim 300 has no legal obligation to let anyone participate in its event, other than to comply with laws banning businesses from discriminating against anyone based on race, sex or religious belief.

And in the case of the Kusko, it had a good reason to ask Sass to stay home. Basically, all the sexual assaults that take place in village Alaska involve people who know each other. The race really didn’t need to be involved in a discussion that might in any way suggest that while sexually assaulting your spousal companion in the village is bad; it can be overlooked if you become a big-name musher.

Of course, Sass, who could have gone home quietly and avoided Kusko problems, doesn’t see it this way and so plays the victim card for the umpteenth time in the YouTube interview.

It can be left to readers to decide if that is exactly what lawyers told Sass. But what the public relations specialists say they would tell him at this point is that the only way out is to accept responsibility, apologize to those who believe you mistreated them, try to convince them you’re a changed man, and then win their support to endorse your re-entry into the Alaska mushing scene.

Only there is no sign that Sass is a changed man. There are, instead, more signs he is a charismatic sociopath whose narrative was derailed, leaving him looking for a new narrative to embrace.