To Rev. Kate Stevens:
You wrote in the Greenfield Recorder on June 20, 2020: "We need to listen; we need to learn the real United States history and hear all the stories that have not been told."
I am writing to offer you the opportunity to do exactly that.
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| John & Kate: not a fucking peep from them about their friends destroying my reputation and career with lies. |
You know me. You officiated the wedding of Julie and Dave — people I care about. We have been in the same rooms, at the same tables, in this valley. You know the kind of person I am, or you did.
Before June 6, 2020, your public record on racial justice was substantial. In 2018 the Greenfield Recorder documented your three-month, 6,000-mile pilgrimage through the South to study civil rights history — visiting the Equal Justice Initiative's National Museum of Peace and Justice in Birmingham, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where King was assassinated, the Southern Poverty Law Center, sites of the 1965 Bloody Sunday march. You described the purpose plainly: "It's not that I'm studying somebody else's history; I'm studying my history, as a white person." You said the church should be a moral leader. You said seeing others as beloved human beings is the very heart of ministry.
On June 6, 2020, you co-organized a protest at the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls. You recruited peacekeepers. You helped design the ceremony — the kneel, the chant, the silence. You personally instructed me to put on a mask at that event. You were therefore directly aware of my presence. You published a moving account in the Recorder in which you described the emotional weight of the moment and called on the community to do the work of listening.
Your account did not mention me.
Not my presence on the bridge. Not the two minutes of documented harassment that preceded the clip that went viral. Not the fact that one of the peacekeepers you recruited — Katherine Hennessey — would spend the next five years filing eight unverified police reports against me, all of which collapsed under first evidentiary review, before physically assaulting me on a public sidewalk on November 30, 2025.
Your husband John was present on the bridge that day. He is visible in the video documentation while the crowd encircled me. You organized the event. You knew I was there. You said nothing then and you have said nothing in the six years since.
You published a call to listen and hear stories that have not been told. Mine was one of them. You chose not to tell it. You chose not to ask about it. You chose, in the years that followed, not to respond to any communication about what was happening to a man you knew.
On the Question of Peacekeeping
Your Recorder account describes how you had recruited several people to do peacekeeping "to deal with any hecklers or angry motorists."
The record raises a question I have never been able to get answered: what authority did those peacekeepers have? What instructions were they given? What did it mean, in practice, to be designated a peacekeeper at an event you co-organized?
Katherine Hennessey assumed a monitoring and enforcement role on that bridge. The June 29, 2020 audio recording — made on her own devices — documents her coaching her husband on what he supposedly witnessed for the purpose of a police report. The same recording documents her stating "I really don't care about your life." The same woman filed the first of eight unverified reports against me in the days that followed.
I am not asking you to have known what would follow. I am asking whether you understand that the infrastructure of that day — the peacekeeping roles, the enforcement posture, the designation of certain people as monitors and others as disruptions — set something in motion that you have never publicly acknowledged.
The peacekeeper became the assailant. On April 7, 2026, Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau were arraigned in Franklin County District Court on charges of Assault and Battery and Malicious Destruction of Property. They entered pleas of not guilty. They are currently on bail with stay-away conditions. As recently as June 12, 2026, a vehicle I believe belongs to Brook Batteau drove past my rented property at 119 State Street — within the stay-away distance — while I had a witness present. I reported it to the DA's office the same day.
You have said nothing.
On Trinity Church
The April 2024 Trinity Church newsletter identifies Brook Batteau as the church secretary and you as pastor. This is a matter of documented public record in the church's own published materials.
Following his April 7, 2026 criminal arraignment — after entering a plea of not guilty to Assault and Battery charges for his role in a sidewalk beating that sent me into documented atrial fibrillation — Brook Batteau filmed a music video at Trinity Church. The stained glass windows of the sanctuary served as the visual backdrop.
I am not saying the church endorsed the assault. I am not saying the clergy approved the video with knowledge of its full context. I am saying that a man criminally arraigned for participating in a documented beating used the visual authority of a house of worship as a backdrop for his public presentation in the weeks following that arraignment. Trinity Church has not responded to communication about any of it.
In the behavioral framework I developed from this experience — the Cold Cruel Sidestep — this is called Distributed Maintenance: the phase in which bystander institutions quietly sustain the inverted narrative after the active actors have stepped away from direct accountability. It does not require coordination. It requires only the path of least resistance. The music video gets filmed. The newsletter gets published. The email goes unanswered. The narrative holds.
On the Specific Theology of This Moment
You are a minister. You wrote about George Floyd: "I could hear George Floyd crying. It wasn't loud like our cries on the bridge; it was more like a quiet sob."
I am not comparing my situation to his. What was done to him was a murder by agents of the state and the scale of that injustice is not mine to claim.
But I will say this plainly: the same principles you invoked on that bridge apply here, or they apply nowhere.
You called on white residents to "fight for racial justice as if our very lives depended on it." My documented atrial fibrillation — attributed by my physician to the sustained stress of this six-year campaign — reduces life expectancy by five to ten years according to the American Heart Association. The department whose written non-contact policy enabled six years of one-sided complaint processing against me is the same department whose detective was denied qualified immunity by a federal judge in March 2026 for manufacturing probable cause. The selective enforcement documented in my case and the selective enforcement documented in the federal court record are the same institutional failure wearing different faces.
On June 11, 2026, you published a letter in the Recorder about community support for a local pharmacy and hospital nurses. The letter included the line: "We have to decide who we support."
You traveled 6,000 miles to study how institutions fail victims. You returned and wrote that seeing others as beloved human beings is the very heart of ministry. You organized the event that set this in motion. Your husband watched it happen.
We have to decide who we support.
You have that voice. I am inviting you to use it.
The Beatitudes Are Not Complicated
Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Blessed are the merciful.
The man who was beaten on the sidewalk — who threw zero punches while absorbing thirty-plus blows, who screamed for help, who filed a police report, who sent letters to every institution he could reach — that man has been waiting six years for someone with a public voice and a stated commitment to justice to say: I hear you. What happened to you was wrong.
To the Leadership of Jewish Institutions: Fitchburg State University and Regional Organizations
There is a polished stone bench on the hill above Buckland, in the cemetery that looks out over the Deerfield River valley. I made it for the Garfield Wright family. A Jewish family. After Susan Garfield Wright died, her husband and daughters came to me and asked me to move large stones from their property to the cemetery, polish one into a bench in her memory, and design it to receive a bronze plaque telling her story. When I was finishing the installation, Amazing Grace played on the chimes in the bell tower of the nearby church. I had never heard it live before. I stopped working. It was one of the most moving experiences of my thirty-five-year career.
In the summer of 2020, a woman named Janice Sorenson told twenty-two thousand people, as settled fact, that Jewish people were my target of choice.
No evidence was offered. No incident was documented. No direct quote was cited. No witness was named.
Her partner, Michael Hoberman, Ph.D., is a Professor of English at Fitchburg State University specializing in Jewish American history, literature, and regional folklore. He is a Fulbright Scholar. He has published with Rutgers University Press and Oxford University Press. He delivered a public lecture entitled "Only In America: Anti-Semitism" at the Sunderland Public Library in September 2024. His entire scholarly identity is built around knowing what antisemitism is, what evidence is required to establish it, and how communities polarize around unverified accusations.
On June 14, 2023, on a public sidewalk on Conway Street in Buckland, he looked at me — a man he had never spoken a single word to in his life — and said: "You are an antisemite."
He said it without a quote. Without a witness. Without a single piece of documented evidence. He said it while pulling his partner away from me after she had rushed me with her fists clenched from ten feet away.
I filed a formal police report that day. I sent a civil demand letter with a settlement offer of one hundred thousand dollars, with an explicit willingness to accept published apology letters in lieu of financial damages. Neither produced any response. I sent communications to Fitchburg State University. No response.
I documented the contradiction between Hoberman's scholarly standards and his street conduct in a published essay that has been publicly available since May 2026. No response from the university. No response from any regional Jewish organization.
Let me be direct about why that silence matters.
When a credentialed scholar of Jewish American history deploys the accusation of antisemitism as a street weapon — without evidence, against a man who had built a Jewish family's cemetery memorial, who had carved a Kabbalistic Tree of Life for a Jewish client, whose oldest friend is Jewish, who has a thirty-five year record of public art in this community — and when that deployment is met with complete institutional silence from the entities whose purpose includes protecting the integrity of that charge, those institutions are participating in the devaluation of the very history they claim to protect.
The accusation of antisemitism is either supported by evidence or it is not. This one is not. There is no evidence. There has never been any evidence. The bench is on the hillside. Anyone can go see it.
Michael Hoberman said, in a February 2026 interview, that reducing complex human encounters to flat accusations of bigotry is "just not particularly interesting. It would be one more story we've all heard before too many times."
He said that six months after saying "you are an antisemite" to a man he had never met, on a sidewalk, without evidence.
Fitchburg State University has said nothing about this contradiction. The university's general counsel has received communication about it. The response has been silence.
I am asking the Jewish institutional community directly: is this acceptable to you? Is a tenured professor's deployment of your community's most severe historical charge as a personal street weapon, without evidence, against a man who had built your neighbor's memorial, something that warrants no response?
If it is, say so. If it is not, say that instead.
What I Am Asking of All of You
Not a retraction. Not a dramatic public gesture. Not an act of institutional self-flagellation.
I am asking for what Rev. Stevens asked of others in June 2020: listen. Read the record. Read the court dockets, the police reports, the judicial findings. Read the annotated affidavit. Look at the photograph of the bench on the Buckland hillside. Look at the Black Stones of Africa in the Pothole Fountain, installed nine years before a petition called me a racist. Look at the federal court order denying qualified immunity to the detective whose department processed eight reports against me without a single interview.
And then decide whether the principles you have published — about listening, about evidence, about the integrity of serious accusations, about what it means to stand where your principles require — apply to this story.
You wrote, Reverend Stevens, that things have to reverberate in the minds and hearts of white people for change to happen.
I am a white man in Shelburne Falls who has been called a KKK member, a child predator, a woman hater, a racist, and an antisemite — every accusation without a single piece of supporting evidence — while the institutions of this community have processed those accusations without ever interviewing me, and while the people who made them have faced criminal arraignment for assaulting me.
This should reverberate.
The stories that have not been told are all at johnsendelbach.com.
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I have been waiting six years for someone to ask.
John F. Sendelbach Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts June 2026