I bet you people are wondering why I put out the
Joan Livingston served as Editor-in-Chief of the Greenfield Recorder from December 2018 through January 2022. Those were the years in which the Recorder published two front-page articles about me without interviewing me. In June 2020, Katherine Hennessey and her group confronted me on the Iron Bridge. She refused to leave me alone. Her daughter Alouette recorded only the second half and posted the edited video. From that video came a Change.org petition calling for the removal of my public art. The Bridge of Flowers Committee got involved. Kay Berenson—founder and former publisher of the Greenfield Recorder—was on the committee. The Recorder, under Joan Livingston's editorial leadership, coyly reported on the existence of that petition, but they never reported why it was actually removed: it had been taken down by the platform for explicit defamation and misinformation violations. The paper's second front-page piece celebrated a laminated anti-racism sign the Committee installed three feet from the anti-racist fountain I had built for them nine years earlier, photographed in a frame that cropped out my work and the Black Stones of Africa. Under Joan Livingston’s editorial leadership, I became, in the public record of Franklin County, a racist disruptor. For two years on my website, I publicly used the phrase "false pariah" to describe this wreckage; Livingston's upcoming text would simply drop the modifier. The paper never corrected either article.
Joan Livingston’s son is Zachary Livingston. He owns Floodwater Brewing. Floodwater sits at 40 State Street in Buckland, Massachusetts, approximately seventy-five feet from where Katherine Hennessey threw my recording phone into the Deerfield River on November 30, 2025. I actually became friends with Zack as soon as he came around after buying the place. We had many instances where we discussed demolition and buildout strategies, not as a construction supervisor, just friendly conversations and tossing ideas around. Zack put a massive amount of personal work into establishing that brewery, but my hands are in its physical infrastructure.
When his concrete pour arrived, I saw the scene and felt morally obligated to step in. There were eight or ten men, but I could see in sixty seconds that no one knew how to finish the floor properly. There was a severe risk of early hardening before they could work the surface, so I stepped in to save the pour. I got on my knees and screeded the concrete floor for three or four hours, expediting the process with technical methods and training Zack as I went—especially on how to load and wheel wet material. The bartop didn't come out of nowhere; it was the final touch. Long after that floor was settled, I supplied the material, provided the supplier contact, and taught him the fabrication technique for the zinc bar he serves across. He gave me my wheelbarrow back caked in dried concrete. The thanks never came.
On November 30, 2025, outside the brewery, Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau assaulted me. A third individual pinned my elbows so she could punch freely. More than thirty combined blows. I did not retaliate. I screamed for help. Approximately ten bystanders stood on the sidewalk. None intervened. Hennessey picked my still-recording iPhone off the road, walked seventy-five feet to the Deerfield River bank, and threw it in while the screen was lit. Zachary Livingston picked my shoe up and handed it to me. He then asked Brook Batteau why he had pushed me. Batteau’s voluntary response to a neutral witness: “You don’t understand, John has been after my family for five years.” Livingston replied: “But you still shouldn’t have pushed him.” Livingston’s sworn statement, December 9, 2025, is the prosecution’s cleanest independent evidence.
On December 15, 2025, Katherine Hennessey’s Harassment Prevention Order against me was denied with prejudice. Judge Mazanec told her directly from the bench that he did not believe her, marking his third official judicial finding of non-credibility against her across five years of proceedings. This occurred on the exact date of my father’s 100th birthday.
On April 7, 2026, Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau were formally arraigned in Franklin County District Court on criminal charges of Assault and Battery and Malicious Destruction of Property, rendering Commonwealth v. Hennessey (2641CR000158) and Commonwealth v. Batteau (2641CR000159) permanent public records. That exact same day, Joan Livingston—the former Editor-in-Chief of the Recorder, the woman whose newspaper launched the original smear campaign against me—released her novel, The Unforgiving Town.
The plot of the novel centers on a man named Al Kitchen who returns to a fictional Massachusetts hilltown after serving seventeen years in prison for manslaughter. He killed the owner of the local bar following a longstanding feud. He comes home, tries to live quietly, and fix up his grandmother’s house. The town will not have it. It freezes him out, harasses him, and blocks every path toward ordinary life until he ends up dead on a back road. His cousin is the only mourner. The reviewer in the Greenfield Recorder—where Joan Livingston used to run the editorial floor—called it hopeful, writing: “If this criminal can reform, so can any of us.”
I am not a criminal. I have never been convicted of a crime. I have lived in this valley since 2009—seventeen years, the exact span Al Kitchen spent in prison. I was ostracized by this community for six years before I ever wrote a word about the brewery. But I did write about the brewery. After the assault, after six years of institutional abandonment, I published extensively.
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| No Recorder articles about literal racism in our community, by the son of the Recorder editor. The Jim Crow cake post in the modern day Klavern got 34 likes!!! It's right on top of my zinc bartop idea I gave to Zack. |
I documented the 1924 KKK crosses in Shelburne Falls—including one floated downstream on the Deerfield River past the exact location where Floodwater now operates. I published the parallel between those institutional mechanisms of exclusion and the ones deployed against me. I found and published a racially offensive image posted to Floodwater’s own Instagram account, styled in Jim Crow era visual iconography, positioned directly on top of the zinc bar I had supplied and whose fabrication technique I had taught. They had to pull the post and issue a public apology. According to a source with knowledge of the account’s analytics, the apology generated more engagement than any post in the brewery's history. In the language of Joan Livingston’s novel: I killed the bar owner.
The causality in the novel runs in the conventional direction. Kitchen kills the bar owner first. Then he becomes the pariah. In what actually happened, the sequence is completely inverted. The friendly buildout conversations and the concrete floor happened first. The zinc bartop was the final touch at the end of that buildout. Then, through uncorrected front-page newspaper fabrications, I became the pariah—six years before I ever touched the brewery’s reputation or wrote a word about it. Only after the institutional abandonment, the ignored warnings with the paperwork, and the physical assault did I publish the investigative articles that damaged the bar's standing.
But flip the timeline and the parallel assembles itself without effort: Protagonist. Bar owner. Town. Pariah. The author is the bar owner’s mother. The bar owner’s mother ran the newspaper that helped build the pariah’s designation. The bar owner’s sworn statement is the prosecution’s key evidence against the people the newspaper protected.
On May 15, 2026, the Recorder published a prominent, positive review of Joan’s novel. The ultimate chronological irony is absolute: a fictional story about a pariah ending up dead in a ditch was celebrated by the paper she used to run on the heels of a criminal arraignment involving her son's long-time customers and musical guests. When Hennessey's daughter’s lyric about killing an adversary with bare hands is dismissed by law enforcement as a mere song, and the former editor's story about a pariah ending up dead on a back road is celebrated by the paper, the line between literature and an active threat disappears. I am the dead guy in the ditch. The book is not an exploration of rural empathy; it is a blueprint for my erasure, published on the morning of an arraignment to give an escalating local hostility its final, psychological permission structure.
I sent Joan Livingston approximately ten letters over six years. She did not answer any of them. When I encountered her on the street, she ran the cover that she was in cancer treatment and that other people were handling the editorial responsibilities. But her name was still right there on the masthead—she was still leading the paper. There was zero acknowledgment for the letters I sent detailing my own severe health situation and how the stress had left me with permanent atrial fibrillation. There was no care about my health while her newspaper was actively destroying my life. She claimed the articles couldn’t be taken down, which was demonstrably false—they had been inaccessible for years before the paper reissued them with fresh indexing in August 2025. She is now a Buckland Select Board member. Her son’s sworn statement is in the prosecution’s file. Her paper reviewed her novel. Her novel is about me and her son, in whatever order you prefer.
The bar is still standing. My cardiac record is documented. The articles are still up. The phone is in the river.
The correction would have been free.
They weaponized the silence, I weaponized the truth
That is exactly why I wrote the
The analytical parallel presented by these chronological facts is stark. It lays out a strict sequence: a series of initial buildout interactions, an escalating community conflict, a major media distortion, a physical assault resulting in criminal charges, and the sudden release of a local novel detailing the death of a town pariah, written by the mother of an individual central to the narrative.
Whether these overlapping timelines are interpreted as a conscious commentary or a remarkable subconscious reflection of real-world community friction, they document a profound sense of institutional abandonment and personal vulnerability. Moving forward, capturing the ongoing legal developments, medical realities, and community dynamics through objective, verifiable records remains the most direct way to establish the facts of the situation.
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©2026 John F Sendelbach
Outsider, outlier, on fire standing on the edge
Outcast in the village where the insiders hedge
They cash the free-money checks while the cleaver swings mean
Call the truth a disruption, paint the mirror as clean
I never asked for silence when the moment turned loud
Just carried iron and flowers through the same old crowd
But the river keeps secrets where the phone still lies deep
And the bench I forged stands while the garden holes weep
I’m the outlier, the outsider, singing what I see
They false pariah’d the blacksmith for refusing to kneel
Maverick in the margins, renegade in the fight
Telling stone-cold truth under small-town spotlight
Outlier… outsider… they can’t bury the light
Lone wolf on the iron bridge, wild card in the mill
Eccentric with the hammer, they branded me for ill
Black sheep in the cultural council’s velvet game
While the vampires sip grants and rewrite my name
They baited with a frog mask, laughed while flipping signs
Threw the only witness in the Deerfield’s cold spine
Then swore they were terrified, hands in pockets so pure
But the archive stays granite and the footage stays sure
I’m the outlier, the outsider, singing what I see
They false pariah’d the blacksmith for refusing to kneel
Maverick in the margins, renegade in the fight
Telling stone-cold truth under small-town spotlight
Outlier… outsider… they can’t bury the light
Anomaly, aberration, odd one out in the square
Fish out of water breathing truth in the air
Heretic for the record, dissenter with the proof
They weaponized the silence, I weaponized the truth
No square peg fits their round hole when the iron runs hot
The trailblazer’s lonely till the whole damn town forgot…
Yeah, I’m the outlier, the outsider, voice that won’t fade
False pariah in the papers, but the river won’t trade
Iconoclast with the bellows, free spirit unchained
They can throw the phone deeper, but the story’s engrained
Outlier… outsider… still forging through the pain
Outlier… on fire… the truth cuts like flame
Outsider… outsider… false pariah
Outsider… outsider… false pariah
Outsider calling, outlier standing tall
False pariah falling, but the hammer never falls
on fire… outlier… false pariah
Outsider… on fire… false pariah
they’re all liars, they’re all liars, they’re all liars
They weaponized the silence, I weaponized the truth
They weaponized the silence, I weaponized the truth
They weaponized the silence, I weaponized the truth