(or, How the Greenfield Recorder Accidentally Published Exhibit A in a Five-Year Perjury Bonfire)
Above the fold, full color, the photo dominates: Kate Hennessey—arms wide, face lit by bonfire glow—standing beside Brook Batteau in the heart of the Art Garden’s 10th annual Winter HooPla. Reed Sparrow’s crows dangle overhead with their painted pleas to “resist” and “keep loving.” A kraken of light attacks a glowing ship. Butterfly puppets flutter. The railyard in Shelburne Falls transformed into a winter wonderland, vacant of people oohing and aahing, volunteers serving hot chocolate, positive notes projected on studio walls, love declared stronger than hate. And there she is, quoted dead center: “Every year the HooPla gets a little bigger and a little brighter,” says Hennessey, “the keeper of the flame.”
Seventy-four days earlier—December 1, 2025—she sat in a lawyer’s office or at her kitchen table and swore under oath in a Harassment Prevention Order affidavit that my presence in Shelburne Falls had made public life intolerable. She claimed terror so profound she wore a giant papier-mâché frog mask to a November 22 public art event because she “suspected Mr. Sendelbach might show up … and didn’t want him to recognize me.” She described running from me, stopping only to avoid being alone with me, dialing police because I was “unhinged.” She said seeing my car in a parking lot made her “choose to drive away rather than interact.” The town, in her sworn words, had become a place she could barely navigate.
Then, on November 30, 2025, she walked out of Floodwater Brewery, joined an assault on a public sidewalk, struck me repeatedly in the head and face while someone pinned my arms, seized my still-recording iPhone, carried it seventy-five feet to the Deerfield River, and threw it in. Shelburne Police Sergeant Kurt Gilmore investigated, found probable cause for two counts of assault & battery and one count of malicious destruction of property against her, one assault count against Brook Batteau. Neutral eyewitness Zachary Livingston (brewery owner, son of a former Recorder Chief Editor) gave a sworn statement confirming the sequence and quoting Brook: “You don’t understand, John has been after my family for five years.”
Judge William F. Mazanec III—same judge who vacated her 2023 HPO after audio disproved her “kill my family” claim—reviewed the Keystone Market video (her laughing, flipping me off after screaming “I feel unsafe”), the 2020 audio (her applying “KKK members” to me, later inverted in her affidavit), the physical impossibility of her parking-lot “newspaper” story, the contradictions in live testimony—and on December 15, 2025, denied her petition with prejudice. A formal judicial finding of bad faith.
The headline chosen by the Recorder—“It’s art and community”—is almost too perfect. For five years this family, led by Hennessey, worked methodically to turn the community against one of its most visible artists: me. My sculptures stud the town—the Bridge of Flowers installations draw visitors every season, Brookie the Trout swims in RiverWorks Park, the Sturgeon series sits in permanent collections—yet a coordinated campaign of edited videos, false petitions (removed by Change.org for defamation), defamatory letters to landlords, over ten police reports (all collapsed under scrutiny), and repeated court filings painted me as the threat. Institutions averted their eyes. Clients vanished. Workspaces were lost. A cardiac condition worsened under sustained stress.
And the Recorder? It amplified parts of the early narrative without retraction, even as Kay Berenson—former publisher, Bridge of Flowers committee member, self-described fake-news lecturer—participated in private 2020 Zoom meetings that helped fuel the exclusion without ever contacting me, the longtime contributor whose work literally defines parts of the Bridge.
This isn’t recovery from trauma. This is the mask off. The bonfire in the railyard burned bright that Saturday night. So did the one lit under her own sworn credibility four months earlier.And the Greenfield Recorder—whether through indifference, selective memory, or the quiet architecture of small-town solidarity—just handed out the kindling. ~~~ HooPla?
