SIX YEARS: THE COMPLETE RECORD
The Unforgiving Town Was Real
By John F. Sendelbach Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · May 2026
PART I: THE FRAME
Chapter 1: The Book Review as Mirror
On May 15, 2026, the Greenfield Recorder published a book review.
That is not unusual. The Recorder publishes book reviews, community announcements, features on beloved local residents. It is a newspaper of record for Franklin County and the North Quabbin, serving — as its masthead says — the people of this region since 1792. It has served some of them better than others.
The review was of a novel called The Unforgiving Town, written by Joan Livingston, who served as editor-in-chief of the Greenfield Recorder — and the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Athol Daily News — from December 2018 through January 2022. The reviewer was Tinky Weisblat, a food writer and local historian, self-described "Diva of Deliciousness," and her admiration for Livingston was total. Five books since leaving the paper. An audiobook. Two screenplay projects in development. "Talk about a work ethic!" Weisblat wrote. "I admit I'm a little jealous."
Here is the plot of The Unforgiving Town, as described in the review. A man named Al Kitchen returns to the fictional Massachusetts hilltown of Holden after serving seventeen years in prison for manslaughter. He killed the owner of the local bar while attempting to rob it. He and the bar owner had a longstanding feud. Most people in town believe the killing was deliberate, not the lesser charge he was convicted on. He has nowhere to go except the house he inherited from his grandmother. Prison changed him — he read, he worked hard, he came to regret what he did. All he wants is to fix up the house, find a job, live quietly. To become, in the reviewer's words, "a useful member of society."
The town won't have it.
It treats him as a permanent pariah. It refuses to accept that a man can change. It harasses him, freezes him out, blocks every path toward ordinary life. When he ends up dead on a back road — in what the police chief suspects was not an accident — his cousin is the only mourner.
Weisblat calls it hopeful, ultimately. "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 and worked in Shelburne Falls since 2008 — eighteen years, approximately — which is, in one of this story's sharper ironies, almost exactly as long as Al Kitchen served in prison. And that parallel does not end there. Al Kitchen served his time for something he actually did. He robbed a bar. He killed a man. The community's response was disproportionate and cruel, but it was not invented from nothing. It had a factual anchor.
I have been serving mine for something that was manufactured from a selectively edited video and run through institutional machinery that never once asked for my side of anything.
The town in The Unforgiving Town is called "unforgiving" because it will not forgive a man who did something real. The town I live in manufactured the thing it refuses to forgive.
Joan Livingston has written a novel about the cruelty of small communities that decide, and refuse to un-decide. She lives here. She was editor-in-chief of the newspaper for the three years in which this happened to me. She is now a Buckland Select Board member — she is, at this writing, in governance, sitting on the body that oversees a town whose police department personnel are named in active federal civil rights litigation. She did not answer my letters. She has written a book about it instead.
The Recorder gives her a feature review celebrating her empathy for ostracized outsiders. It has never corrected what it did to one.
I gave her a heart locket once, in the years before everything fell apart. The kind of thing a neighbor gives to someone he respects. Small, inexpensive, offered in the ordinary warmth of people who live in the same small place and know each other by the work they do. She did not answer my letters.
This document is the correction the paper declined to make.
What follows is the complete record: every player, every date, every institution, every mechanism. It is precise because the record demands precision. It is long because six years is long. It is here, on this page, in full, so that anyone who wants to understand what happened in Shelburne Falls between June 2020 and April 2026 can do so in a single sitting — without clicking through three separate articles, without being routed around a paywall, without finding only the version that was written without interviewing me.
This is the version with me in it.
Chapter 2: Who I Was Before the Video
There is a particular cruelty in the architecture of public cancellation that its architects rarely acknowledge: it requires no engagement with the actual record of the person being cancelled. A thirty-year body of work embedded in the physical landscape of western Massachusetts — in granite, welded steel, polished stone cemented into public pavement — does not fit inside a Facebook thread. So the thread ignores it, and the institutions that should have known better follow the thread.
Let me tell you about the concrete, and then the zinc, because together they are the most compact illustration of how I move through the world — and of the precise nature of what was done to me.
A few years ago, my longtime friends sold the building they owned on the river in Shelburne Falls after the flooding devastated it. The Deerfield River had filled the basement chest-high with cold, diesel-black mud that stank for weeks and destroyed everything stored there. I helped them for two days, shoveling it out. My own place was six inches higher and completely untouched. Six inches. I went anyway, because that is what you do.
A young man named Zack bought the building and opened a brewery. He named it Floodwater. I want to be precise about my reaction when I heard that name: I thought it was an act of profound inconsideration to the people the flood had actually destroyed. The same river that had filled my friends' basement chest-high with diesel mud, that had wiped out years of their work, was now being invoked as a brand. I kept that opinion to myself. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I helped anyway.
When his concrete crew arrived to pour the basement floor — eight, maybe ten men — I could see in sixty seconds that no one knew what they were doing. Wheelbarrows facing the wrong direction. Wet concrete hardening in the chute. Wet concrete does not wait. I stepped in. I reorganized the pour. And then I got on my knees and screeded the floor myself, for three or four hours, training Zack as I went, because no one else on that crew had ever done it.
Every keg of beer that Floodwater has ever served sits on a concrete floor I laid with my own hands.
What did Zack give me in return? My wheelbarrow back — caked in dried concrete. One of the cardinal sins of borrowing a tool. He never properly thanked me for the rowboat I had loaned him for the under-structure work, either. The rowboat came back, eventually. The thanks never came at all.
But the concrete floor is only the first half of this particular story.
Later, when Zack was deciding what to do with the bar top, I immediately suggested zinc sheet. Context matters here. I had recently completed a commission for an architect — a kitchen countertop fabricated from pure zinc sheet, an almost unheard-of material in American commercial fabrication. Important distinction: this is not galvanized steel, which is iron coated in zinc. Pure zinc sheet is an entirely different material. It is rare, beautiful, alive — it develops a natural pewter-grey patina over time that no two pieces achieve in quite the same way. The finest French zinc bars are made of it. Almost nothing else in American commercial fabrication is. My father was a lifelong metalworker and he had never heard of it. I had to find the specialist supplier through the architect, learn a specialized soldering technique and a specific solder, source materials I had never handled before. I completed the commission successfully. It was beautiful.
I had leftover sheet. I offered it to Zack, gave him the supplier's name — he would need more than I had — and spent time teaching him the technique: how to solder it, how to work with it, what it would become over time. He did it himself. It looked great.
The sentence that now needs to be said plainly: not only did I lay the concrete that every keg in that building rests on — I supplied the zinc, taught the technique, and gave away the knowledge that became the bar that every pint is served across. The floor and the bar. Both surfaces. The foundation and the face. I built Floodwater Brewing.
Return on that investment: a caked wheelbarrow and an unreturned rowboat.
I tell this not to settle a score with a brewer. I tell it because a few years later, the same community I had served for eighteen years decided I was the problem — and the story of the concrete and the zinc tells you exactly how accurate that verdict was.
The professional record is worth stating plainly, because it is the answer to erasure. In 1998, I won first place from the Amherst Public Arts Commission for the Crossroads Salamander at Cushman Common in North Amherst — my first major public sculpture. In 2002, I aligned the Sojourner Truth memorial plaques in Florence, drilling the anchor holes by hand in slanted granite. Anti-racist public art, installed without fanfare, eighteen years before the cultural moment that would weaponize the language of anti-racism against the man who had quietly practiced it. The Mill Canal Newt in Amherst in 2003. The Minuteman Crossing Stone Plaza at UMass Amherst — hand-laid Ashfield schist — in 2006, which received the 2014 AIA Honor Award from the Western Massachusetts chapter. Brookie the Trout in River Works Park in Greenfield: ten feet of stainless steel cutlery donated by Franklin County residents, installed approximately one mile from the Franklin County District Courthouse where my attackers would be arraigned on April 7, 2026 — the fish leaping toward the courthouse, as if in on the joke. Old Diamondsides: a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon assembled from seventeen hundred salvaged utensils, with hand-blown glass eyes crafted by Jeremy Sinkus, commissioned by the Culinary Institute of America — an active institutional relationship worth approximately $14,000 that the 2020 campaign severed before its natural conclusion.
The Bridge of Flowers relationship ran from 2003 to 2020 — seventeen uninterrupted years. The River Bench. The Trolley Gate. And the Pothole Fountain, which I designed with mason Paul Forth in 2011. Forth had two biracial daughters. His partner had a vision that included polished stones shaped to the African continent, permanently embedded in the entrance fountain's stone inlay as tribute to those daughters and to his partner's design sensibility. I approved it. I helped execute it. I was proud of it. Those stones were in the ground nine years before the 2020 petition called me a racist. When the Bridge of Flowers Committee installed an anti-racism plaque in June 2020, they placed it approximately three feet from the anti-racist installation they had asked me to build. They did not acknowledge this. They did not appear to have remembered it at all.
There is other work that deserves naming here, because it speaks directly to an accusation that would arrive without warning in the summer of 2020. A local Jewish woman named Susan Garfield Wright commissioned stone sculptures for her home, pieces that remained on display there throughout her life. After Susan's death, her husband and daughters came to me with an intimate request: move large stones from the family's property to the cemetery on the hill above Buckland, and polish one into a bench in her memory — designed to receive a bronze plaque telling her story. A permanent marker for a Jewish family, built by hand, in the Buckland cemetery. Anyone can go see it. A local Jewish man commissioned a sephirot — the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in polished stone — for his raw emerald collection. He loves it. One of my oldest friends, Jewish, taught me my first guitar chords thirty-five years ago. Those chords are used every day. Joan Livingston is Jewish. Joanne Soroka, the longest-serving member of the Bridge of Flowers Committee, is Jewish. Zack Livingston is Jewish by lineage.
None of this is incidental. It is the counter-evidence to an accusation not yet made but coming — an accusation that would be stated as settled fact to twenty-two thousand people without a single supporting document, a single witnessed incident, or a single direct quote.
My career was built, in substantial part, on the trust of women. Women recruited me, commissioned me, recommended me to other commissioners. The UMass Minuteman Crossing commission came through a woman. The CIA sturgeon commission came through a woman. The Deerfield Academy work came through a woman. The Bridge of Flowers fountains came through a women's committee that called me, in writing, "a great supporter and very responsive to particular needs." I also built a bench on Bridge Street in collaboration with Muhammad Yaseen, a Palestinian man whose family has members currently sheltering in Gaza. That bench is seventy-five feet from where Katherine Hennessey first screamed in my face on June 6, 2020. They never walked those seventy-five feet.
This is who I was before the video. The record is specific. It is verifiable. It was available to every institution that would subsequently act against me without consulting it.
PART II: THE ORIGIN EVENT AND ITS ARCHITECTURE
Chapter 3: The National Weather System — 2020 as Atmospheric Condition
You cannot understand what happened in Shelburne Falls in June 2020 without understanding what was happening in America. This section is not a defense of any political position. It is an explanation of an atmospheric condition.
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd died in Minneapolis during a police restraint. The moment became a national flashpoint of extraordinary force and speed. What followed was the rapid deployment of what might be called secular martyrdom — a cultural compliance environment in which any public dissent from the full BLM platform was categorized as racism. The speed and totality of this categorization was unlike anything in recent American civic history. Nuance was not merely discouraged; it was treated as conclusive evidence of the position it declined to endorse.
Businesses donated millions. Celebrities posted black squares. Professional organizations issued statements. In cities and towns across the country, public monuments were toppled and street names were changed in the span of days. The structural condition was clear: in June 2020, any white man who raised questions — including about why a road was closed during a pandemic — was instantly processed as a racist disruptor. The social machinery was primed to handle exactly that signal.
The Floyd family received a $27 million settlement from the city of Minneapolis. The working-class small business owners who absorbed the uncompensated shockwaves of civic unrest across the country — including the ones in Shelburne Falls whose access roads were closed without notice on a pandemic Saturday — received nothing.
In Franklin County, the national impulse was localized to a smaller, more precise target. The progressive community of Shelburne Falls — many of them urban transplants from Boston, New York, and Northampton who had arrived in the valley seeking its aesthetic without its material demands — attempted their own reckoning. Their target was a functional iron bench and hand-forged fish sculptures on a historic bridge, and the man who made them. Their instrument was a thirteen-minute Facebook video that began filming two minutes after the triggering events had concluded, and a Change.org petition created by an eighteen-year-old who was not present at the event she was organizing around.
The bridge itself is worth noting. The Bridge of Flowers was built on the bones of a 1908 trolley span — the Shelburne Falls and Colrain Street Railway. When the trolley line was discontinued in 1929, local women's clubs and manual laborers transformed the trestle by hand into the floral garden it remains today. It was not built by the kind of people who would arrive a century later to mandate public silence from above it. It was built by the kind of people who have always built things in this valley — with their hands, their backs, and the understanding that something made by labor is worth more than something declared by performance.
Chapter 4: The Blueprint — Kalliope Jones and the 2015 Proof of Concept
Before I document what happened on June 6, 2020, I need to establish something: what happened that day was not improvised. It had been tested and perfected five years earlier, by the same family, at a county fair in Cummington.
In the summer of 2015, Alouette Batteau's band, Kalliope Jones, competed in the Battle of the Bands at the Franklin County Fair. An unpaid volunteer judge — a man who had given his time to the event — wrote "sultry" on a score sheet, almost certainly meaning "soulful" or "evocative," which is standard complimentary language in musical performance evaluation. The Batteau family posted the judge's score sheet online, isolated the word "sultry," and deployed it as evidence of sexual harassment of a minor.
The result: national press coverage. Today.com. Music blogs. Outrage aggregators. The judge went into hiding for fear of retaliation. He was never publicly heard from again. Kalliope Jones gained a national profile from what had been a regional competition. The fair's general manager, Bruce Shallcross — a respected community figure, cherished father and grandfather, someone who had dedicated years of service to the event — publicly defended the judge, clarifying that the comment was transparently benign and had almost certainly been misconstrued. His defense was ignored. The judge was never given a platform to explain himself before the verdict was rendered.
Alouette Batteau was approximately fourteen years old at the time.
Five years later, in June 2020, the same mechanism would be deployed against me at a different scale. Strip context. Begin recording after the triggering events. Deploy the viral machine. Let the target disappear while the accusers become heroes. No investigation required. No full context needed. Selective framing and moral outrage manufacture a villain and mobilize a community.
The band's promotional copy in 2020 asserted "ever-heightening anti-solipsistic sophistication... representative of wisdom beyond their years." The irony deserves a moment: the word "sultry" was weaponized when a judge used it in 2015. The band's own post-2020 promotional photographs feature exactly the kind of presentation the family had previously characterized as inappropriate. The Kickstarter campaign for their album invokes "unhoused neighbors" and "people in Gaza" to guilt potential donors — while the family was in receipt of Cultural Council grants totaling at least $10,000 (Alouette's $5,000 and Brook's $5,000, separately awarded). This is the moral economy of the family: invoke suffering for personal gain, deploy it as social leverage, discard it when inconvenient.
Alouette was nineteen in 2020. She was not impulsive. She knew exactly what she was doing and exactly how it worked. She had watched it work once already.
Chapter 5: June 6, 2020 — What Happened Before the Camera Started
Every catastrophe has an origin point that looks, in retrospect, both inevitable and absurd. This one begins with a road closure nobody bothered to announce.
On June 6, 2020, a BLM demonstration was organized on the Iron Bridge without notification to the adjacent business owners whose livelihoods depended on the road being open. This was a pandemic Saturday — the first retail weekend after Massachusetts Phase II reopening. Every one of us was already hurting from three months of zero traffic. Every one of us had been waiting for this Saturday. Both bridges over the Deerfield River were closed — the sole vehicular arteries through the village center. My studio at 44 State Street sat approximately four hundred feet from the bridge. I found out the road was closed when I couldn't get to work. I heard the noise rolling down the river and walked toward it. This was my legal right.
I turned my camera on and walked through the crowd, speaking to my own camera, documenting the closure. I did not engage with anyone. I had not said a word to a single person. I was not wearing a mask; I have health conditions that preclude it, and I had not expected to find myself in the middle of a crowd of people who were themselves not socially distancing. Joey Kotright was running a bullhorn call-and-response at the far end — say something, the crowd screams it back, full volume — and the whole scene was already loud and chaotic.
Sonny Walters — a woman I had never met before in my life — approached me and got close. I asked her to leave me alone. Clearly. More than once. Three explicit requests, spread across approximately two minutes. She persisted. She would not stop. For two minutes, this woman who did not know me, who I had never spoken to, sustained continuous close-range harassment directed at a man who had said nothing to her.
That two minutes is what Alouette Batteau's video does not contain.
As Walters continued and the noise built, Katherine Hennessey and others joined in and pinned me against the east railing of the bridge. Trapped at the rail, surrounded, unable to move forward or backward, that is the moment — that precise moment of maximum pressure — when Alouette Batteau raised her phone and hit Facebook Live.
The crowd saw the camera come up. And the crowd, apparently understanding that what they had been doing for the past two minutes did not look the way they wanted it to look, cleared out. They stepped back. The confrontation that had been physical a moment earlier went suddenly still.
That clearing is not in the video either.
What viewers saw next — with no context for what preceded — was a visibly agitated man in a suddenly quieter crowd. One might say the video begins in the silence that follows an assault and presents that silence as the opening of a peaceful scene. Once the space opened, I said what I said: "I'm not gonna be a slave to people like you." Then I turned and walked away.
They followed me.
I walked. They followed. When I realized I was being followed, I turned around. They got in my face again, trying to stop me from talking, trying to shut me down. Hennessey flagged the police at this point — the first time officers were formally involved — but the officers, who were standing nearby and had watched the entire prior sequence, did not come. I turned around and walked away again, another thirty feet down the bridge. They were still following. I turned around once more. More words were exchanged. And then they locked elbows — a physical human chain blocking the full width of the bridge — and refused to let me pass.
Police officers stood approximately twenty feet away and watched. They did nothing.
All of this — the following, the blocking, the locked elbows, the officers watching — is on the video. The thirteen-minute video that Alouette posted to Facebook. The video that went viral and reached twenty-two thousand people. If you watch the whole thing, rather than the carefully cropped excerpt that circulated most widely, you can see Katherine Hennessey and her associates following a man who is trying to walk away, blocking his path, refusing to let him pass.
The next morning, Hennessey filed a police report. She was the victim, by her account. The video — all thirteen minutes of it — showed her committing the acts she was claiming I had committed. The following. The blocking. The refusal to let someone pass. That is the most devastating part of this, and it is the part that the narrative of "disruptor at peaceful vigil" was engineered to prevent anyone from examining closely: the video documented their conduct, not mine. Misdemeanors, plural. Continued following, continued verbal assault, physical blocking of a public thoroughfare. And then Hennessey filed the police report.
The June 27, 2020 "take you down" incident:
One of the nightly protest series that continued through late June. I was having a consensual conversation with Joey Kotright at the protest — I had a series of prepared questions and he was failing them one by one — when Alouette drove through the intersection and stopped, delivering a sarcastic "Hi John" through her car window.
I said: "I'm gonna take you down."
What I meant: I am going to get your video taken down. I am going to take you down off your high horse. It was a figure of speech about the defamatory video, about the legal process I was already pursuing, about accountability. The subject of the sentence was the video, not Alouette's physical person.
Kotright's response to this exchange: he moved to the double yellow lines in the middle of the intersection and screamed "Fuck you, John Sendelbach, and everyone who's with you" with both middle fingers raised in the air. Forty to fifty witnesses present. Including Sergeant Kurt Gilmore.
Katherine Hennessey's subsequent sworn affidavit would twist "I'm gonna take you down" into a threat against Alouette's physical safety. She omitted Kotright's screaming, middle-finger performance entirely. She omitted the context that made the phrase's meaning unambiguous. And on the June 28 recording — on Hennessey's own audio — you can hear her coaching Brook on what he supposedly heard: "You said he said he was going to take her down." She was feeding him the police report narrative while the event was still fresh. The fabrication is contemporaneous. It is on their own recording.
A note on Joey Kotright: The bullhorn voice of the June 6 protest was not, it turns out, a disinterested community leader. A bankruptcy filing dated January 29, 2021 lists Kotright-Gonzalez, Joe J., 39 Green St., Apt. 1, Shelburne Falls, Chapter 7. A 2016 court record documents pretrial probation for violation of an abuse prevention order and assault and battery on a family or household member. He was required to abide by any 209A restraining order in existence. On his own audio from the June 2020 confrontations, he directed racial slurs at me — "cracker" — and referred to his own children as his "brown project." This is the man who was presented in the viral video as the moral voice of the protest, and in Recorder coverage as the community's legitimate organizer.
Chapter 6: The Petition and the Paper — The Founding Documents
The petition that became the formal instrument of the campaign against me was filed by Bianca Cavanaugh-Green, who was eighteen years old in June 2020 and was not present at the June 6 protest she organized around. She watched the edited video. She drafted the petition.
Before I quote it, a note on who she is: In March 2018, Bianca was arrested for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (a felony charge), school disturbance, assault and battery on a police officer in two counts, and resisting arrest. All charges were dismissed; she was placed on pretrial probation through January 2019. When people raised this history in the comment threads, she posted: "people keep wanting to bring up [my] arrest... happened in high school, never charged... I have PTSD, unhealthy environment, felt unsafe, trapped, ended in a shitty way, not a bad or violent person." I believe her about the PTSD. I believe people can grow beyond difficult moments. She later confirmed this about herself, directly to me.
The petition stated, in full: that I was "rudely and inappropriately interrupting" a moment of silence, "being very hostile and clearly just trying to get a rise out of people," "constantly smiling," and had invaded people's space "without a mask." She claimed I had said "police lives matter most," which she interpreted as meaning that I believed "black peoples lives matter less." She called for the removal of my bench and suggested replacing it with art by "local people of color." She wrote: "The wonderful black families and children deserve to feel safe and supported. The town supporting this man is doing the opposite."
Six hundred or more signatures in three days. Change.org removed it on June 9, 2020 — for defamation and misinformation violations. That is a third-party institutional finding that the foundational document of the campaign against me was built on false content. The removal was never reported by the Greenfield Recorder. Neither was the reason.
Approximately three years later, I visited Bianca at her home to offer her the opportunity to avoid a defamation lawsuit by submitting apology letters to the Recorder and the Gazette. I did this in full view of the police station across the street, aware that cameras were almost certainly running. She answered the door. We talked in the breezeway because it was cold. I told her about my father's evolution on race — the Black hospice nurse who came to tell him my mother had passed, and his subsequent response to my pressing him: "It didn't matter that she was black. Lots of Black people around this nursing home." Ninety-two years old. The man who had chased me with a racial slur when I was eighteen years old had arrived somewhere different. She listened.
Her mother appeared and told me: "We are a family of lawyers. Bring it."
But before that, Bianca said something I have not forgotten: "You're actually very kind and understanding. I just wanted to say this so that people knew."
The petition was filed on a lie. The person who filed it knew it was a lie within three years of filing it. The Recorder has never reported either fact.
The Recorder's founding articles: On June 12, 2020, the Recorder ran "Artist's work in question following petition" on the front page, bylined by Mary Byrne. I had "declined to comment" on the petition's existence — which means I was not asked about what happened on the bridge before Alouette started recording. I was not asked about my thirty-year professional record. I was not asked about the Black Stones of Africa that had been in the pavement three feet from where all of this was happening for nine years. My bench was photographed. My name was in the headline. I was the story and I was not in the story.
A second front-page article ran on June 15. Joan Livingston was editor-in-chief for both.
On June 13, 2020 — the same weekend as one of those articles — Livingston published a "My Turn" column about the paper's COVID and BLM coverage. She praised her staff and closed with these words, which I have read more times than I can count: "I want to emphasize the mistakes a newspaper, including the Recorder, makes in its coverage are public mistakes. And we own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism."
She has not corrected these articles. She has not answered my letters. She has written a novel about a community that refuses to correct its mistakes about a man it has decided to hate.
Cheryl Dukes — and the anatomy of a conflation: Cheryl Dukes, a Black woman who sang "This Little Light of Mine" at the June 6 protest, later posted publicly about being harassed by white men in pickup trucks near the BLM signs — they gave her the finger, mouthed "fuck you" from behind their trucks, one business owner asked her if she was a member of a gang. Her post was real and her grievance was legitimate. It also contained zero mention of me. It was about other men, other incidents, on other days. It was shared widely in the same social networks as the campaign against me, and it was absorbed into the ambient atmosphere of that campaign as if it were about June 6 and as if I were its subject. I was not. The conflation was never corrected.
PART III: THE FIRST WAVE
Chapter 7: The Digital Mob — An Accounting
The Facebook thread beneath Alouette Batteau's video was not spontaneous outrage. It was organized, named, specific in its economic targeting, and it is archived in full: 120 or more participants, timestamped, preserved in a 100,000-byte digital ledger. The archive is the record. The archive outlasts the thread.
Amanda Star Kingsley — The Absent Witness:
Her foundational comment, which I have now read thousands of times, states: "I was on the other side and had no idea this was happening."
This is the structural confession of the entire campaign. A multi-year moral crusade — initiated and driven in significant part by this woman — rests on a foundation document in which she explicitly states that she was not present and had no idea what was happening. She does not say this as a disqualification. She says it as a prelude to economic warfare.
Her next sentence: "Which makes me want to create a list of businesses that support anti-racist policy so we know where to shop locally."
Eight distinct comments. Two hundred and fifty-three words. Targeted economic coercion rebranded as community care. Her goal was to pressure the Shelburne Falls Business Association into establishing an ideological filtration trade gate. Corporate doxxing marketed as values alignment.
In 2026, Amanda Star Kingsley has rebranded into a digital life coach running a platform called Speaking Light Into Abortion. Her core marketing mantra: "I believe that some things in life pick us… I believe that my baby picked me so that I could do this work, so that I could help other women find inner peace." A profound human medical choice has been transformed into a collaborative corporate joint-venture and premium coaching product origin myth. Her website explicitly disclaims: she is not a medically trained therapist, not a mental health professional, and expressly disclaims all liability for psychological damage suffered by clients. The disclaimers on the wellness website and the disclaimers on her activist intervention work identically: no accountability for wreckage.
Victoria Rolon:
She wrote, in the thread: "I would throw his camera in the water."
On November 30, 2025, at approximately 5:32 PM, Katherine Hennessey picked my still-recording iPhone off the pavement in front of Floodwater Brewing, walked approximately seventy-five feet to the bank of the Deerfield River, and threw it in while the screen was lit. I watched the lit screen arc into the water from thirty feet away.
The mob imagined the ending in June 2020. The assault delivered it five years and five months later. The thread is still in the archive.
Rhonda Anderson — Massachusetts Commissioner of Native American Affairs:
She called me "toxic" and an "unhinged conspiracy theorist" in the thread, lending the weight of a state government title to a narrative she had not investigated. What she did not mention in the thread — what would have complicated the framing considerably — was that in 2019, I had offered her and her husband the opportunity to co-own a shop at 44 State Street to showcase their Native American sterling silver jewelry alongside my metalwork. They declined. She felt comfortable calling me toxic to twenty-two thousand people without disclosing any of that prior relationship. Office plus accusation equals institutional amplification without institutional accountability.
The death threats and economic targeting — named and timestamped:
"Throw him off the bridge." "Toss em over." "I'd love to punch him." Calls to boycott the studio, build anti-racist business lists, contact every institution I had worked with. Jackie Kidd, Steve William Lindsey, Richard Adams, Jasper Forest — active in economic targeting and threatening language. Mahalia Dean: "THANK YOU to you and your mom for getting in his face and getting him off the bridge" — endorsing the assault retroactively and publicly. These statements exist in the public record with names attached and timestamps. They generated no police response.
The Sonny Walters bicycle encounter, summer 2020:
Weeks after June 6, Walters encountered me again — this time on a bicycle. She rushed close, taunted me: "Did you get hurt? Do you want a Band-Aid?" This in front of her minor daughter, who was present. She later acknowledged, on camera, "I shouldn't have gotten in your face like that." This acknowledgment — that her June 6 conduct was inappropriate — was made and then apparently forgotten, because it does not appear to have changed anything about the subsequent institutional processing of complaints against me.
The economic consequences — documented:
Under community pressure generated by this campaign, I was asked to leave 44 State Street — a space I had occupied for nine years. I left voluntarily, to protect my landlord's relationship with the community. My shop closed. The CIA commission pipeline — approximately $14,000 in active institutional relationship — was severed by the summer of 2020. Multiple clients cancelled commissions citing online allegations. Over $385,000 in documented economic harm across the full six-year period. The targeting was coordinated. It ran.
Chapter 8: The Antisemitism Charges — The Most Damaging Accusation in the Thread
This section was the last to be written and addresses the most damaging single element of the entire campaign. A false accusation of antisemitism — stated as settled fact to twenty-two thousand people by a woman who had apparently harbored it privately for years, then amplified in public by her partner, a credentialed Jewish studies scholar who had never spoken a word to me — poisoned relationships that a lifetime of genuine work had built. It must be addressed with the same documentary precision as everything else in this record.
In the comment thread beneath Alouette Batteau's video, Janice Sorenson published, to twenty-two thousand people, as settled fact:
"I 'unfriended' him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice. And yet something does not feel completely right about planning his full demise."
Parse this carefully. Two sentences. The first: a declaration of antisemitism stated as established fact — no evidence offered, no incident documented, no direct quote cited, no witness named. The second: a cover maneuver. By expressing slight discomfort about "his full demise," she pretends to be a troubled bystander while having just assured it. The first sentence destroys. The second sentence is deniability.
The precision of the deception is worth naming: accuse someone of the most socially radioactive charge possible in a progressive community to guarantee reputational destruction, while simultaneously performing reluctance to establish moral distance from the consequence. She knew what she was doing. In Western Massachusetts's progressive community, being labeled an antisemite is not a minor thing. It is worse than being called a racist. It closes doors in the arts community, the academic world, the nonprofit world, the circles where commissions originate and reputations are maintained. She said it anyway. To twenty-two thousand people. With zero supporting evidence.
Janice Sorenson lives in Buckland with her partner, Michael Hoberman, Ph.D.
Michael Hoberman is a Professor of English at Fitchburg State University, where he has taught since 2001. He specializes in Jewish American history and literature. His most recent book, A Hundred Acres of America: The Geography of Jewish American Literary History, examines how generations of Jewish American writers have addressed place and landscape in their work. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019. Reviewed in the LA Review of Books, Shofar, and MELUS Journal. He is a Fulbright Scholar, a former visiting professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and co-chair of the Buckland Planning Board. He writes in Tablet Magazine. A book is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2026. He has written publicly about his own Jewish background and identity: pieces for NEPM reference "my Jewish father" and his ongoing engagement with Jewish tradition.
He is, in other words, one of the foremost credentialed authorities on Jewish American experience and history in the region. His life's scholarly work is the documentation and analysis of Jewish identity, Jewish history, and the intellectual and ethical content of what antisemitism is and is not. His credentialing makes the false accusation both more damaging and more precisely ironic: the person best positioned by training and expertise to recognize what antisemitism requires for evidence endorsed it in the middle of a public street against a man he had never spoken to.
The counter-evidence is the record established in Chapter 2 and needs only to be named here: the memorial bench for Susan Garfield Wright in the Buckland cemetery; the sephirot in polished stone for a local Jewish man who loves it; Joan Livingston, Joanne Soroka, and Zack Livingston, all Jewish, all people I have worked alongside or given gifts to or built things for; the oldest friend who taught me guitar chords I use every day; the Black Stones of Africa and the Sojourner Truth plaques, both installed decades before any of this happened. None of this stopped the accusation. Because the accusation was never about evidence. It was a weapon deployed in the optimal environment for maximum damage with minimum accountability.
The June 14, 2023 confrontation — exact sequence:
I saw Sorenson cycling on Conway Street. I should note the context: road construction in summer 2023 had rerouted my normal daily travel through an intersection where looking right meant looking toward School Street — the Hennessey-Batteau family home. I passed that intersection two to three times daily for the duration of the construction project, approximately one thousand passes within six houses of their residence. I never turned down School Street. Never drove past their house. Never made contact. One thousand free opportunities. Zero incidents. That detour record is itself the definitive factual refutation of every "follows us everywhere" claim filed in every subsequent proceeding. It is also the reason I was at that intersection when I saw Sorenson.
I asked her to come back and talk. She agreed, rode her bike approximately one hundred feet back to the side of my car. This was the first time I had seen her since her comment three years earlier. She said she couldn't remember the comment — it had been three years. I filled her in on the exact quote. Some words followed. I got out of my car to talk on level ground — my neck was cricked sideways leaning out the window to speak.
She interpreted the movement as a threat. She dropped her bike. She rushed me from approximately ten feet away, closed to within twelve inches of my face, fists clearly clenched, made a threatening statement, and did not step back.
Michael Hoberman — scholar of Jewish American experience, who knows exactly what antisemitism is and what evidence is required to establish it — intervened physically, forced her away from me. As he turned his head toward me, he said: "You are an antisemite."
I said: "You just assaulted me."
She said: "I didn't touch you."
They left.
I filed a police report with Sergeant Budrewicz that same day. I sent a letter of intent to sue for defamation and criminal assault under M.G.L. c. 265 §1A. Settlement demand: one hundred thousand dollars, with a stated willingness to accept formal apology letters to the Greenfield Recorder and the Daily Hampshire Gazette in lieu of civil litigation. Neither the police report nor the letter produced any institutional response. No charges. No investigation. No reply.
The pattern by this point should be familiar. A woman in this community makes a false public accusation. Is confronted directly and asked to account for it. Charges from ten feet with clenched fists. Declares she never touched anyone. Sonny Walters ran this sequence on the Iron Bridge on June 6, 2020. Katherine Hennessey built a five-year legal architecture on this exact behavioral pattern. Janice Sorenson executed a compact version on a Buckland side street in June 2023, with her partner — one of the leading scholars of Jewish American literature in the region — providing the intellectual capstone of "antisemite" as he pulled her away.
An accusation of antisemitism is not strengthened by the credentials of the person delivering it. It is not proven by the identity of the person endorsing it. It is either supported by evidence or it is not. This one is not. There is no evidence anywhere in any record. There never was. The accusation was launched to twenty-two thousand people and then repeated in person, with fists, when I asked about it. It was endorsed, without examination, by a scholar whose entire career is built on knowing the difference between prejudice that has evidence and prejudice that does not.
I stick up for Jewish people. I believe that when someone within any community — Jewish, Catholic, secular, any — behaves badly and causes harm to others, they should be called out. That is not antisemitism. That is basic moral consistency applied without tribal exemption. The people who deployed this accusation understand the distinction perfectly. They chose to erase it anyway.
Chapter 9: The Audio Record — What It Actually Sounds Like on Tape
What happened after June 6 was organized, sustained, and institutional — and critically, it was documented on audio that the institutions processing complaints against me apparently never requested.
On June 28, 2020, Katherine Hennessey made a recording. At timestamp 3:09, in her own voice, she said to me: "I don't talk to KKK members either, but here we are." She applied the KKK label to me. On her own audio. In her own voice. She would subsequently claim, in sworn affidavits across multiple legal proceedings from 2023 through December 2025, that I had applied that language to community members — a complete inversion of the audio's direction. Every time she made that sworn claim, the recording that refuted it had existed the entire time. That is the definition of perjury. It recurred across four and a half years of proceedings without generating a single referral from any officer or court.
Also on this recording: she coaches Brook on what he supposedly heard — "You said he said he was going to take her down" — feeding him his police report narrative in real time. The fabrication is contemporaneous. It is on her own recording. Also: Alouette at timestamp 5:47 says "You ever hear of racist bigots — oh wait, you are one," a statement that would later be attributed to me in sworn affidavit. It was hers, on her own audio. Also: Katherine gives me the middle finger unprovoked from her car and admits it on the same recording. Laura Iveson inserts herself face-to-face in violation of COVID distancing protocols during this same encounter.
On June 29, 2020, also on the family's own recording: "Yeah, I hate you. Really do. But, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's not against the law. I can hate you all I want." Brook Batteau: "Quit your white whining" — a racial slur, on the family's own audio. "I really don't give a flying fuck." "I really don't care about your life." Alouette bum-rushed me from ten feet, closing to within twenty-four inches while her parents watched without reaction. At timestamp 3:57: "I know that I can get a restraining order against you if I want to. And I will." She added: "You'll know when I'm threatening you." She meant it as a promise. November 30, 2025 was the delivery.
These recordings are the Rosetta Stone for the entire subsequent six years. Every tactic that would define what followed is previewed in that audio: the HPO threats, the racial framework deployed as a weapon, the hatred declared openly while the institutional machinery was simultaneously used to paint me as the aggressor. All on their own recordings, in their own voices, because they did not believe anyone would ever listen carefully enough to matter.
The same day these recordings were made — June 29, 2020 — Sergeant Kurt Gilmore emailed Katherine Hennessey: "I've talked to John. It doesn't work." The permission slip. In writing. The institutional and personal machinery had synchronized.
While this was happening, the Bridge of Flowers Committee was assembling around me without my knowledge. In late June 2020, the committee held secret Zoom meetings to coordinate the removal of my work. These meetings were organized by Kay Berenson, who is also a co-founder of the Greenfield Recorder. The conflict of interest — the woman organizing secret meetings to erase my commission also co-founded the paper covering the story — was never disclosed in a single Recorder article. No one from the committee called me. There was no hearing, no conversation, no attempt at due process of any kind. Seventeen years of professional relationship, ended by Zoom. Committee member Ann Loftquist would later tell me to my face that the committee had "thrown me under the bus." I appreciated the honesty. It changed nothing.
PART IV: THE INSTITUTIONS
Chapter 10: The Two Towns — A Structural Analysis
Shelburne Falls is not one community. It is two communities occupying the same geography with fundamentally different relationships to its material reality. Understanding this divide is prerequisite to understanding how institutional failure sustains itself for six years without requiring conspiracy — how a permission structure, once written down, runs on its own.
The traditional locals are multi-generational hilltown people: tradesmen, manual producers, mechanics, farmers, people operating in the physical economy of gravity, loads, and raw materials. Many hold traditional biases that are entirely transparent — they do not possess an academic vocabulary to mask their tribalism. They are transactional and grounded in the material world. They did not cancel me. Several helped me during this period. Several are friends.
The progressive transplants are a different population: wealthy, high-status urban refugees from New York, Boston, and Northampton — many with academic credentials — who arrived in the valley seeking its aesthetic without its material demands. They dominate local town boards, committees, civic infrastructure, and nonprofit boards. They deploy the language of inclusion as a mechanism of exclusion, the vocabulary of social justice as a tool for class positioning and social control over the native working class. The specific irony: the people who declared me a racist disruptor hold governance control over a community with essentially zero structural diversity — in demographics, economics, aesthetics, and physical trades. They are the monoculture declaring war on a neighbor for disturbing the monoculture.
The applause incident — the operational definition of benevolent racism:
At a local town meeting, a Black woman stepped to the microphone and made an explicit request of the white audience before she began speaking: "Please do not clap for me when I am finished."
Clear. Direct. Stated in plain English. An act of individual sovereignty — asking to be heard on her own terms, not to be converted into a performance of other people's virtue.
She concluded. The progressive crowd — led by the exact white liberal women who had spearheaded the cancel campaigns against me — gave her a loud, self-congratulatory standing ovation. Their obsession with performing their own virtue completely erased the speaker's individual autonomy in the moment that most required them to honor it. They did not treat her as a peer whose stated preference deserved respect. They treated her as a prop for their own internal narrative of righteousness.
This is the operational definition of benevolent racism: wearing the costume of allyship while doing precisely what it claims to oppose — treating a Black person as a means to a white person's self-image rather than as an autonomous individual.
The same women who screamed at me for disrupting a protest could not, in the moment that actually required listening to a Black person's direct instruction, bring themselves to do it.
The infrastructure monopoly:
The systematic rebranding of a functional manufacturing village into a curated boutique tourism and recreational landscape is managed by the same class that manages the committee and the select board and the paper. Road closures and events paralyze working tradespeople without compensation, without alternatives, and without notice. On August 10, 2024 — Bridge Classic road race day — when I attempted to seek basic redress from race director Michael McCusker on a public road, Chief Bardwell threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct. The volunteer who was hurling expletives at me and threatening to destroy my reputation on Facebook received no address from Bardwell. Simultaneously, Sergeant Gilmore physically positioned his body to block my camera from filming the volunteer, jockeyed as the camera moved, and then shook the volunteer's hand as the man drove away.
Two officers. One target. Two constitutional violations. On camera. In broad daylight. In front of witnesses. The permission structure wearing a yellow safety vest.
The farmland debates proceed on schedule: extended town arguments about the abstract aesthetic preservation of "farmland," managed by an elite class that simultaneously ran a six-year economic extinction campaign against a real, active craftsman who works the actual materials of the valley. Preserving the idea of working the land. Destroying the person actually doing it.
Chapter 11: The Courts — The False Charges and What the Record Shows
Between 2020 and 2023, Katherine Hennessey filed approximately eight police reports against me. Not once was I contacted or interviewed before any of them. The first time the Shelburne Police Department communicated with me regarding any of those reports was when a process server handed me an emergency Harassment Prevention Order on March 3, 2023 — three years into the documented pattern. Every single one of those reports collapsed the moment anyone examined the underlying evidence.
The foundational policy document is not a secret. On July 13, 2021, Sergeant Gilmore filed incident report 21-133-OF. In it, he wrote — in an official document, with his name attached, submitted to the department's files — that he had told Hennessey "I was not going to call Sendelbach because it hasn't worked in the past." A police sergeant, in official writing, explaining that he had decided not to contact the subject of a complaint not for any articulable law enforcement reason, but because previous contact had not produced whatever outcome he found satisfying. This sentence is the policy. It explains why eight reports produced zero interviews. It explains why every report collapsed the first time anyone looked at the evidence. Nobody above him said anything about that document. Nobody asked what "it hasn't worked" means as a policy standard under constitutional equal protection requirements.
In the summer of 2021, Judge William F. Mazanec III reviewed video evidence at a hearing and caught Hennessey lying under oath about physically blocking and elbow-locking me — he saw it on video in real time. She denied it while the judge watched her doing it on screen. This was the first of three findings of not-credible testimony against Hennessey by the same judge. No perjury referral.
In March 2023, Hennessey filed a sworn affidavit claiming I had "homicidal tendencies" and would "try to hurt or even kill" her family. Officer Christopher Pettengill wrote the criminal harassment charge based entirely on her account — without ever meeting me. Detective Tucker Jenkins co-signed it — also without ever meeting me. An emergency Harassment Prevention Order was issued ex parte on March 3, 2023. I learned of it when the process server arrived at my door.
If the department had genuinely believed I had homicidal tendencies, they would have come to my door. They went to hers and filed paperwork. The allegation was the instrument. The HPO was the goal.
On March 22, 2023, Judge Mazanec vacated the emergency HPO the same day I played him the audio recording of the encounter Hennessey's affidavit had described as containing a homicidal threat. The audio documented my actual words: "I will never get along with the likes of you." It documented Hennessey laughing throughout the encounter. The judge heard the audio and vacated the order immediately. Second not-credible finding. No perjury referral.
On June 6, 2023 — three years to the day after the founding event — a clerk-magistrate at a show-cause hearing reviewed approximately one hour of evidence and found no probable cause for the criminal harassment charge. Jenkins sat in the room and watched the charge collapse exhibit by exhibit. I spoke for the better part of an hour. I watched the clerk's body language shift as she began to understand the actual facts. She asked for the thumb drive of evidence; I got it to her the next day. By the end of the week I had the No Probable Cause finding in hand. The first time anyone examined the underlying evidence, the charge fell apart. Jenkins generated no referral and took no corrective action.
The summer 2023 road construction detour: For the entire summer of 2023, road construction routed my daily travel through an intersection where looking right meant looking toward School Street — the Hennessey-Batteau home. I passed that intersection two to three times daily for the duration of the project. Approximately one thousand passes within six houses of their residence. I never turned down School Street. Never drove past their house. Never made contact. One thousand free opportunities. Zero incidents. That record alone defeats every "follows us everywhere" claim filed in every subsequent proceeding.
The summer 2023 supermarket encounter: I was directly behind Brook Batteau in the checkout line at a Greenfield supermarket. I did not speak. I did not make contact. I paid for my groceries and left. Documented non-pursuit. Filed nowhere because there was nothing to file.
When I later encountered Jenkins at a road race he was working traffic for, I asked if we could talk on video. He agreed. He confirmed on camera that he had never met me before the show-cause hearing. He told me I had received "due justice." I told him that a man cannot receive due justice when officers have never come to interview him about a single one of the complaints filed against him. He did not appear to have a response to that framing.
On December 15, 2025, Hennessey appeared before Judge Mazanec on her own HPO petition. She asked if she could sit down because she didn't want to continue watching the assault video. Mazanec denied the request. Fourteen minutes of footage that directly contradicted every material claim in her December 1 affidavit. Third finding of not-credible testimony. Denied with prejudice — a judicial finding of bad faith. Cannot refile on the same grounds.
Three separate occasions before the same judge. Three not-credible findings. Zero perjury referrals. That failure to refer is itself a systemic failure: it created a de facto license to lie that emboldened the escalation culminating in the November 30 assault.
The victim advocate at the DA's office who listened to me for thirty minutes was genuinely empathetic. She said, paraphrasing: that's probably because Hennessey has been spreading these lies around town. She verified my point of view. Then she said Bardwell should probably be doing something — and punted the ball back to Bardwell, who told me I had received due justice and did nothing.
Chapter 12: The Permission Structure in Full — The Complete Cop Saga
To understand what the Shelburne Police Department became in these six years, you have to read the personnel file alongside the case file. They are the same document.
The founding documents establish a policy, not an incident. Report 21BUC-54-OF, July 13, 2021: Gilmore writes that he told Hennessey he was "not going to call Sendelbach because it hasn't worked in the past." June 29, 2020 email from Gilmore to Hennessey: "I've talked to John. It doesn't work." Together, these two documents establish: one party receives police response regardless of evidence. The other does not. Not as a single instance of poor judgment but as documented, written departmental policy that ran for four years without retraction or acknowledgment by anyone above Gilmore in the chain of command.
Pettengill's double standard — the full account: In spring 2024, a driver beeped aggressively at me, gave me the middle finger. I followed on my normal route to capture the license plate. The driver slammed on his brakes at the Conway Street intersection — nearly causing a rear-end collision — exited his vehicle, and approached my driver's window aggressively, recording me while I was trapped with no safe way to leave. Pettengill responded. He acknowledged the aggressive behavior. He noted the expired registration and invalid inspection sticker. Then he called back to say he could not charge the driver without also citing me for "driving while filming." No charges filed against the driver.
Ten days later, Pettengill pulled the same driver over on Route 2. I observed from a legal distance. Instead of towing for the known violations, he allowed roadside assistance to handle it and let the driver leave. He then filed an incident report that framed me as the aggressor, omitted the driver's actions and violations, and failed to note that he had activated his body camera without informing me — caught on my own recording. This is the same officer who co-signed a criminal harassment charge against me in 2023 without ever meeting me.
October 16, 2025 — Bardwell at the gas station: I stood in front of Chief Bardwell at the Neighbors gas station on the Mohawk Trail in active atrial fibrillation. My heart rate was near 180 beats per minute. I asked him to feel my wrist. This exchange is on video. He said: "I don't want to." He then stated he "can't charge false police reports" — a statement that is factually incorrect under M.G.L. c.269 §13A. He directed me to the Attorney General's office and walked into the store for coffee. Three days later, at the Massachusetts State Police barracks in Shelburne, Officer Sheerer witnessed my condition and called EMS. A Stryker LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor recorded my heart rate between 130 and 230 beats per minute. Officer Sheerer is a neutral third-party witness. The machine has no opinion. It simply records what it reads.
The state trooper called EMS three days later. The chief called for a medium regular.
The Walker letter — the most catastrophic single failure: On September 6, 2024, Hennessey wrote to my commercial landlord Brad Walker: "It's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." Walker forwarded it to the Shelburne Police Department. It was received by Detective Jenkins. He read it approximately twelve days late. He filed no report. He issued no warning. He conducted no interview. He took no documented action of any kind.
Fourteen months after that sentence was written, she hurt me. On a public sidewalk. In front of witnesses. More than thirty combined blows.
Brad Walker's response to the letter deserves to be stated: he declined to evict me and offered one hundred dollars toward professional mediation. He wrote that evicting a tenant under community pressure "would place every other Tenant here at The Mill on notice that their workspaces are not safe from the whims of management or community grievances." Hennessey refused the mediation offer. She was offered an exit from the dispute she had already committed to paper. She declined it.
The complete personnel record — seven names:
Former Chief James T. Hicks: Resigned in disgrace following sexual misconduct allegations. Set the foundational culture.
Paul John "PJ" Herbert, part-time Buckland officer: Spent thirteen years fabricating combat service in northern Iraq, claiming he had survived an IED strike in which British Royal Marines were killed. Collected $344,000 in fraudulent VA disability benefits. Pleaded guilty March 2025. Caught by federal investigators, not local ones.
Former officer Jacob Wrisley: Convicted of possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, some accessed on department devices while on duty. Sentenced to four to five years in state prison. Permanently decertified by the Massachusetts POST Commission in April 2025, Case No. 2025-020.
Officer Christopher Pettengill: Full double-standard account documented above.
Sergeant Kurt Gilmore: Author of the written non-contact policy; personal author of the June 29, 2020 permission-slip email; the officer who "suggested" — in his own summons report — that the assault defendants seek HPOs against me the night of the battery, before his own criminal investigation was complete.
Detective Tucker Jenkins — the complete record: Co-signs 2023 criminal harassment charge against a man he has never met. Charge collapses at first evidentiary review. No corrective action. In January 2025, a separate DA investigation finds that Jenkins made twenty-five phone calls totaling sixty-seven minutes to an eighteen-year-old female student at Mohawk Trail Regional School over a thirty-day period, and deleted related text messages. The Berkshire District Attorney finds the conduct exceeded professional boundaries. The school district terminates his position. A community petition calling for his removal from the police department gathers 218 signatures. Jenkins declines to be interviewed by DA investigators. Chief Bardwell publicly characterizes the community's concern as "reckless spreading of reputation-wrecking rumors." The Select Board votes to retain Jenkins in a three-hour executive session.
On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni denied qualified immunity to Detective Tucker Jenkins personally in Mlynick v. Town of Erving et al. (3:24-cv-30108), finding it plausible that Jenkins "provided misleading information" and ignored exculpatory facts to manufacture probable cause. The mechanism the federal court found plausible maps directly onto Report 23SHL-8-AR: two officers arriving already "aware of prior incidents," building a charge from one side's unverified account, filing without interviewing the accused.
Thirteen days after the federal qualified immunity denial, Chief Bardwell submitted a merit raise request for his "fantastic crew." The raise was approved. Select Board Chair Rick LaPierre described it as "well worth it."
Chief Gregory Bardwell: Refused to feel the pulse of a man in documented AFib on camera. Stated on video that he cannot charge false police reports. Defended Jenkins publicly. Characterized 218 community signatures as "reckless rumor-spreading." Requested a merit raise thirteen days after the federal qualified immunity denial. Described his department as "fantastic" with all of the above on the record. His April 9, 2026 written response — copied to the Northwestern District Attorney — to a death-threat post made by Alouette Batteau while her parents were on bail: he classified it as "part of a musical performance" that "does not clearly establish that the statements are directed toward you specifically." This determination was made without reference to the six-year documented pattern of this family stating intentions and then delivering on them.
Seven names. One department. Not unrelated incidents. The same environment, repeatedly failing to self-correct even when misconduct became visible to outside investigators.
Chapter 13: The Committee Saga — Seventeen Years and the Plaque Three Feet Away
My relationship with the Bridge of Flowers Committee began in 2003 and ran seventeen uninterrupted years. The River Bench. The Trolley Gate. And the Pothole Fountain — designed with mason Paul Forth in 2011, incorporating the Black Stones of Africa. Those stones were in the ground nine years before the petition called me a racist. The committee had stood beside them at plant sales and maintenance days and ribbon-cuttings for nine years. Then, in June 2020, the petition arrived — and the committee apparently forgot, entirely and simultaneously, that the anti-racist installation they needed to respond to had already been built by the man they were preparing to erase.
The Soroka email — one year before the petition: On August 26, 2019, committee member Joanne Soroka sent me an email. Verbatim:
"Get this through your head. I have not told anyone your personal information… If you slander me, mention me, accuse me or anything that resembles that, I CERTAINLY will get a restrain order against you… You don't know who you are fucking with… You are dead to me. Only when you call my name out, will I reawaken and I promise it will get ugly."
I reported this to local law enforcement. No action was taken. Soroka is Jewish — a fact she felt compelled to mention in what amounted to a death threat letter. She remains on the Bridge of Flowers Committee at the time of this writing, going on fifteen years without a break. This email predates the 2020 petition by a full year and establishes the institutional climate into which that petition landed.
The secret Zoom meetings: In late June 2020, the committee held unannounced Zoom meetings to coordinate the removal of my work. These meetings were organized by Kay Berenson — who is also a co-founder of the Greenfield Recorder. The conflict of interest was never disclosed in a single article: the woman organizing secret meetings to erase my commission also co-founded the paper covering the story. No one called me. No hearing, no conversation, no attempt at due process. Committee member Ann Loftquist later told me to my face that the committee had "thrown me under the bus." I appreciated the honesty. It changed nothing.
The plaque and the photograph: The committee's response to the petition was to install an anti-racism plaque approximately three feet from the Pothole Fountain. When the Recorder photographed it for the June 18, 2020 article, the published photograph was cropped to exclude the Black Stones of Africa. A laminated sign tacked up with thumbtacks, endorsing the "anti-racism spirit" of a petition since removed for defamation, was centered in the frame. My nine-year permanent anti-racist installation was cut out of the frame. That was not an accident of composition.
Chair Annette Szpila was quoted in that same article endorsing the petition and its spirit. At the August 2025 ribbon-cutting for the $3.2 million renovation — a once-in-a-generation civic event at which the speeches were lost to street noise because no one had thought to bring a PA system — Szpila stated to my face, in the presence of a witness, that she had never made the quoted statements. The archived Recorder articles contain her direct quotes.
From June 6, 2020 through the writing of this piece: not one Bridge of Flowers Committee member has contacted me. Not an email, a phone call, or a letter. During this period I was falsely accused of racism in a petition the committee endorsed; I had my studio closed by the community pressure that followed; I sustained documented atrial fibrillation attributed by my physician to the harassment stress; I was physically assaulted with thirty-plus blows on a public sidewalk; my attackers were criminally arraigned. Through all of it, the committee whose endorsement launched the cascade maintained total silence. This is not an oversight. It is a posture.
In 2024, Ann Loftquist informed me that my proposed pieces for the Bridge of Flowers Art Show did not fit the bridge/flower theme. I withdrew the pieces and attended the show. At least a dozen pieces on display had nothing to do with flowers or the bridge — directly contradicting the stated reason. I accepted the exclusion without public complaint. The reason given was not the real reason. The real reason was six years of institutional silence that had calcified into institutional exclusion, and no one in the room was prepared to say so out loud.
Loftquist is the single non-white member in ninety-seven years of the committee's existence. This is noted not to impugn her but because the lack of documented diversity and formal selection processes for committee membership is itself part of the governance failure.
The $60,000 soil error: A contractor confirmed on-site in April 2026 that the Bridge of Flowers Committee had specified the soil type for the $3.2 million renovation without documented professional horticultural input. Wrong soil was specified. Remediation cost: approximately $60,000 in donor and public funds. No public accounting of the failure has been released. No committee member has been identified as responsible. The professional gardening staff — the people who know that bridge at root level, who could have prevented this — were not meaningfully consulted on the specification that failed.
The man who has tended that bridge for approximately twenty years is still the assistant gardener. The people who made the sixty-thousand-dollar mistake are still in charge. The Recorder ran two photographs and a caption about "laying groundwork." No dollar figures. No explanation. No accountability. Not even a question.
Chapter 14: The Newspaper's Architecture
The Recorder's two June 2020 articles were the seed from which everything else grew, and they were not accidents of coverage. They established the frame — disruptor, bad actor, threat to the community — within which every subsequent institutional decision could be made without re-examining the premise.
The conflict of interest at the center of that coverage was never disclosed. Kay Berenson co-founded the Greenfield Recorder. Kay Berenson organized the secret Zoom meetings at the Bridge of Flowers Committee to coordinate the removal of my professional work. These two facts existed simultaneously and were never named in a single article. When I encountered Berenson on Bridge Street some time later and politely asked why she had acted without ever reaching out to me, she called the police. She had given a public lecture on "fake news" as Recorder publisher. She had never met me. She did not appear to notice the relationship between those two facts.
The founding articles quoted committee members endorsing a petition that had been removed for defamation and misinformation — a fact the Recorder never reported. My "declined to comment" in those articles means I was not asked about what happened on the bridge before Alouette started recording, about my thirty-year record, about the Black Stones of Africa sitting in the pavement three feet from where committee members were being photographed endorsing the "anti-racism spirit" of the petition.
The articles went inaccessible for a period, then returned in August 2025 when the Recorder redesigned its website. They were reissued as "newly-added archival stories" — fresh URLs, fresh search indexing, fresh reach. Five-year-old defamatory characterizations given a new publication date and a new audience. Anyone Googling my name for a commission finds them. The August 2025 republication reset the statute of limitations for defamation under Massachusetts law. This is not the archive behaving passively. This is an active republication without correction.
I have written approximately ten letters to the Recorder. Dan Crowley, the current editor, has not responded. Joan Livingston has not responded. When I ran into her on the street, she told me the articles were in the archives and couldn't be pulled down — demonstrably false, they were inaccessible for years before being reissued. She told me she had been in cancer treatment when the articles ran, and that someone else had been doing the editing. I believe her about the cancer and I am sorry she went through that. The letters she did not answer were written after treatment.
The Floodwater double standard: Floodwater Brewing — built on the concrete floor I poured, served across the zinc bar whose material I supplied and whose technique I taught — posted an image on Instagram of a cake that I and others found racially offensive. It received thirty-four likes. Zack posted an apology which, according to someone with knowledge of the account's analytics, generated the most engagement the account had ever seen.
There was no article in the Greenfield Recorder. No petition. No Bridge of Flowers Committee meeting. No front-page headline branding Floodwater a disruptor. No community mobilization. The Recorder ran two front-page stories about me for voicing opinions at a protest. It ran nothing about a brewery — operated by the son of its former editor-in-chief — posting a racially offensive image. The difference in treatment requires only a calendar and a sense of proportion to identify.
The HooPla timestamp: On April 7, 2026, the Recorder published a large, glowing front-page feature celebrating the Winter HooPla art event's tenth anniversary. The article quoted and celebrated Katherine Hennessey as the beloved co-director, "keeper of the flame." Brook Batteau was photographed warmly.
April 7, 2026 was also the day Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau were arraigned at Franklin County District Court.
Case 2641CR000158: Hennessey — Assault and Battery, two counts; Malicious Destruction of Property. Case 2641CR000159: Batteau — Assault and Battery. Both pled not guilty. The court imposed stay-away and no-contact conditions as a condition of bail.
The Recorder celebrated the defendants on its front page on the day their criminal charges were made public. You cannot make this up.
Chapter 15: The Deep Palimpsest — Historical Context
The mechanisms described in this essay are not new. They have roots in a specifically local history that runs several hundred years deeper than the June 6, 2020 video — and understanding that history is not necessary to understanding the injustice, but it is useful for understanding why the injustice felt so natural to the people committing it.
The Bridge of Flowers spans the Deerfield River 3.5 miles west of the Connecticut River's Great Falls at Peskeompskut. The Massachusetts Bay Colony treasurer's account, Volume 30, Page 214, May 29, 1676, contains this entry: "Paid to Capt. William Turner £3 for two Indian scalps, receipt signed Wm. Stoughton." This is approximately where the Turner's Falls massacre occurred — the death of approximately 300 Pocumtuc noncombatants, women and children and elders gathered for the spring fishery, in a surprise dawn attack by colonial militia. The 1798 construction of the Turner's Falls dam permanently drowned the ancient indigenous salmon weirs. The petals of the Bridge of Flowers are the last, fragrant layer of a palimpsest whose earlier inscriptions have been systematically overwritten.
On Thanksgiving night 1924, five crosses burned simultaneously in Shelburne Falls alone — one on the Buckland side of the Deerfield River, one rafted downstream from above the Iron Bridge, three more on surrounding hills. The North Adams Transcript reported "substantial membership" in the local Klan and a planned "canvass for new members." The Improved Order of Red Men, Greenfield Tribe No. 42 (chartered 1915), provided pseudo-Indigenous pageantry as patriotic cover for anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant animus — a 30 to 50 percent national membership overlap with the Klan. A meeting house was documented at Green and Ashfield Streets in Buckland. A sundown purge in the late 1800s scattered fifty to sixty Black residents from Shelburne Falls.
The KKK collapsed in 1928. That same year, the Bridge of Flowers Committee was formed. In 1929, the abandoned trolley trestle was transformed into the Bridge of Flowers by the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club. The same year the Klan went underground, the flowers went in. The 1928 brochure never mentions the river the bridge spans. Beauty as the final instrument of erasure. Petals on purged earth.
The women who had been auxiliaries of fraternal orders organized civic institutions that formalized the social exclusions the Klan had enforced by fire. The mechanisms don't require robes. They require shared aesthetic composition, a founding myth, and institutions that reward the socially comfortable over the socially disrupted. The 2020 Facebook thread is the functional equivalent of the 1924 cross-burning — a public signal to a community about who belongs and who does not. The signal changed form. The function remained.
The women's clubs became garden clubs became civic improvement committees became Bridge of Flowers committees, each generation inheriting the exclusionary structures of the previous one without inheriting the explicit ideological justification. The exclusion became so naturalized that it no longer required articulation. It required only a crisis — like a video going viral — to activate. The Bridge of Flowers Committee, still predominantly white in leadership and still private in its governance structure, functions as the enforcement arm of a social order that has merely updated its vocabulary.
PART V: THE ASSAULT AND ITS ARCHITECTURE
Chapter 16: November 30, 2025 — The Assault in Full
The Walker letter had arrived fourteen months before the assault: "It's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." That sentence was in the possession of the Shelburne Police Department. Jenkins read it approximately twelve days late. He filed no report, issued no warning, conducted no interview, took no documented action of any kind. Brad Walker declined to evict me and offered mediation. Hennessey refused. She was offered an exit from the dispute she had already committed to paper. She declined it and continued toward the endpoint she had already written down.
The frog mask — November 22, 2025: Eight days before the assault. The Bridge of Flowers Moonlight Magic event, one of the seasonal celebrations that turns the bridge into a public gathering place. Hennessey positioned herself six feet in front of me for fourteen minutes wearing a frog mask. Her own subsequent affidavit confirms she wore the mask because she expected me to be there. She did not leave. She addressed me by name: "John, I hope you get the help you need." She called police. Nothing actionable was found.
Eight days later she participated in the assault.
A person acting in genuine fear does not approach, stay for fourteen minutes, taunt by name, and then attack. That sequence describes contempt. Not fear. Cruelty, measured out in fourteen-minute increments.
November 28, 2025: Two days before the assault. Alouette Batteau walked past the Mill fishbowl window, made direct eye contact with me, laughed, moved quickly past. The family knew the choreography was in motion.
The morning — causation, not context: On the morning of November 30, 2025, Hennessey drove onto my rented property at 1 Ashfield Street without invitation or legitimate purpose. She drove past the store entrance to the far end of the lot where my van was parked and screened from the street. She executed a peace sign, then a double middle finger, mouthed profanity, repeated the sequence, and sped away laughing.
I called police within fifteen minutes and made a reconstruction video documenting the property layout and her path. Sergeant Gilmore arrived, took the statement, walked the property line, reviewed prior bodycam footage. He filed no trespass charge. He checked no cameras. He left.
The gas station nearby has security footage covering that area. My phone was in the river by that afternoon, and I had no timestamp to anchor a footage request. The footage may still exist, but a subsequent attempt to retrieve it was unsuccessful. The evidence destruction created the evidentiary gap. That is not exculpatory for Hennessey. That is aggravating — it suggests the sequence was planned with awareness of what evidence would and would not survive.
No consequence in the morning. No deterrent by the afternoon.
5:32 PM — the assault: 40 State Street, Buckland — outside Floodwater Brewing, the brewery I built on the concrete floor I poured and the zinc bar I supplied.
Tom Del Negro exited Floodwater Brewing screaming profanities. Witnesses described him as "primed inside" — the confrontation organized before the door opened. Del Negro is a known musical collaborator of Alouette Batteau. He is the initial aggressor. He appears in Sergeant Gilmore's summons report only as "a male" that I "pointed at." He was never identified. He was never interviewed. The initial aggressor was erased from the official record of the violent assault he is alleged to have initiated. That is not incompetence. That is a managed record.
Brook Batteau charged out and shoved me hard with both hands off the curb to the pavement. I fell, lost a shoe. Batteau jumped on me from behind and began punching — eight to twelve blows. Katherine Hennessey exited the brewery approximately ten seconds later. A second individual grabbed both my elbows from behind and pinned my arms. With my arms pinned and my ability to protect myself eliminated, Hennessey struck me repeatedly in the head and face — thirty or more blows. Ten to twenty additional strikes including strikes that dislodged my glasses. I did not retaliate. I screamed for help.
Eight to ten adult bystanders stood on the sidewalk of a village street in early evening. None of them intervened. The permission structure that had operated institutionally for six years had also operated socially.
I did not swing back. I had suspected for years that this family has serious mental health issues. I was not going to risk hurting someone I believe is unwell. And I was not going to give them the narrative they had spent six years constructing: that I am the violent one. So I absorbed the blows.
The phone — the mob's fulfilled prophecy: My iPhone had fallen to the road during the initial shove. The screen was still lit. It was still recording.
Hennessey bent down, picked it up, walked approximately seventy-five feet to the bank of the Deerfield River, and threw it in while the screen was lit. I watched the lit screen arc into the water from thirty feet away.
Victoria Rolon had written "I would throw his camera in the water" in June 2020. The mob imagined the ending in the comment thread. The assault delivered it five years and five months later.
Hennessey then walked back and resumed striking and kicking me from behind. The second battery occurred after a deliberate pause that included a seventy-five-foot walk to the river to destroy evidence. She did not flee. She returned. This is the legally significant sequence. Kicking anyone while wearing a shoe — "shod foot" — is legally considered assault with a deadly weapon.
There is also what might be called the Zack contradiction in Hennessey's December 1 affidavit: she claims she "headed out to pick up [John's] shoe" — using this as cover to explain her presence hovering over me immediately following the assault. But Zachary Livingston's sworn statement establishes that he was the one who picked up and returned the shoe. Her narrative was cover for the position she was actually in — hovering over me — which is when she seized the phone.
Zachary Livingston: Co-owner of Floodwater Brewing, no prior relationship with me. He handed me my shoe. He then asked Brook Batteau why he had pushed me. Batteau's response, given voluntarily and immediately 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."
This exchange is documented in Livingston's sworn statement to Sergeant Gilmore, dated December 9, 2025. Batteau's admission is a confession. Not self-defense. Accumulated grievance offered as moral authorization. What he calls "being after his family for five years" is six years of demanding that his daughter remove a defamatory video she posted in June 2020.
Zachary Livingston is Joan Livingston's son.
The editor-in-chief who presided over the articles that helped launch this campaign — who told me on the street that the articles couldn't come down, whose institutional silence enabled six years of what followed — her son became the key neutral witness for the criminal prosecution of the people her paper helped protect. That is not a coincidence I invented. That is the structural irony that emerges when a record has been maintained with sufficient precision.
Alice Hennessey — the inheritance inverted: Katherine Hennessey's mother, Alice Hennessey, was a genuine community activist who dedicated her life to protecting people from abuse of institutional power. She served as staff director for the Boston City Council, as an aide to Mayor Menino, and as co-founder of programs pairing teenagers with parents at Rosie's Place, the shelter for homeless women in Boston. The procedural mastery Alice Hennessey built in service of protecting vulnerable people is deployed by her daughter in precise inversion: to pursue, defame, and harm a neighbor who questioned a street closure. This is not incidental background. It explains the sophistication of the legal architecture — the sequential HPO filings, the coached witnesses, the coached police reports, the layered sworn affidavits. Katherine Hennessey learned these tools from a woman who used them to shelter people without power. She deploys them in service of a personal vendetta.
Gilmore's HPO coaching — the final institutional trap: That same night, before completing his own criminal investigation, Sergeant Gilmore suggested to the assault defendants that they seek Harassment Prevention Orders against me. His own summons report (25SHL-47-AR) uses the word "suggested." Three courts subsequently denied my petitions for protection — each starting fresh, none with access to Judge Mazanec's three prior findings of not-credible testimony against the same people. On April 7, 2026 — the day of the arraignment, the day the Recorder celebrated the defendants on its front page — the Commonwealth requested and the court imposed a stay-away and no-contact order as a condition of bail. The judicial system formally acknowledged, in binding legal terms, a risk the Shelburne Police Department had spent six years declining to assess.
Criminal charges: December 11, 2025: Massachusetts State Police probable cause findings. Case 2641CR000158: Hennessey — Assault and Battery (two counts), Malicious Destruction of Property (M.G.L. c.266 §126A). Case 2641CR000159: Batteau — Assault and Battery (M.G.L. c.265 §13A). April 7, 2026: both arraigned, Franklin County District Court. Both pled not guilty. Court-imposed stay-away and no-contact as condition of bail.
The evidence that was never preserved: Neighbors Gas Station cameras would have documented the morning trespass. Crystal Visions, on the ground floor at 40 State Street, had a camera with a direct sightline to the assault location and the phone-toss point. Never contacted. Not mentioned in any report. The law office directly across State Street had an exterior camera covering the same sidewalk. Never contacted. Not mentioned in any report. Floodwater Brewing interior footage was requested by Gilmore approximately nine days after the assault. The system had already overwritten the data.
The three-camera failure was not bad luck. It was the predictable result of a department that had never been required to canvass cameras within a defined radius, never required to document its canvass, never held accountable for the gap between what existed and what was preserved.
Chapter 17: The Cardiac Record — What the Machine Cannot Erase
A police department can decline to preserve camera footage. A court can start fresh with each new proceeding. A Facebook video can be removed the day after legal exposure arrives. But the body records what it experiences with a fidelity that no institution controls and no deletion can reach. When the body's record is documented by neutral third-party medical equipment at specific times and locations, with neutral third-party witnesses present, it becomes evidence of a kind that the machines generating it have no motive to distort.
The Stryker LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor has no opinion about John Sendelbach or Katherine Hennessey or the Shelburne-Buckland Police Department. It reads the electrical activity of a human heart and reports the number. On October 19, 2025, at the Massachusetts State Police barracks in Shelburne, it reported a heart rate of 130 to 230 beats per minute. Officer Sheerer called EMS. He is a neutral third-party witness. The photograph of the monitor exists. The number is the number.
Three days before that reading, Chief Bardwell encountered me in documented atrial fibrillation at a gas station on the Mohawk Trail. I asked him to feel my pulse. He said: "I don't want to." He then stated — incorrectly, under Massachusetts law — that he was unable to charge false police reports, and walked into the convenience store for coffee. This exchange is on video. The state trooper called EMS three days later. The chief called for a medium regular.
Atrial fibrillation was formally diagnosed in 2021. My physician attributed its onset to the sustained stress of the documented harassment that began in June 2020. The American Heart Association is unambiguous: repeated AFib episodes are self-reinforcing, each one lowering the threshold for the next, the heart progressively learning that electrical chaos is its default state. Untreated cases reduce life expectancy by five to ten years.
These people have been shortening a life, measurably, for six years. That sentence is not rhetorical. It is the direct implication of the American Heart Association's guidance applied to the documented cardiac timeline. The equipment has no motive. The numbers don't change based on who asks.
The triggering events in this record are specific, dated, and traceable to specific actions by specific people.
September 4, 2024: a one-month episode triggered within twenty seconds of visual contact with Alouette Batteau entering my workspace, before conscious processing was complete. The body had learned to recognize the threat before the mind finished the recognition.
October 16, 2025: Bardwell at the gas station. Three-day episode.
November 30, 2025: the assault. Cardiac emergency at the scene. EMS called.
March 11–12, 2026: at an HPO hearing before Judge Powers, a bailiff shouted directly into my disclosed hearing-impaired ear. Powers watched without intervening. When the resulting disorientation appeared as difficulty communicating, Powers editorialized: "that doesn't help your case." I declared active atrial fibrillation in open court. No response. A six-day episode began and did not resolve until March 17.
On March 23, 2026, Alouette Batteau — while her parents were on bail, with court-imposed stay-away conditions in effect — posted lyrics wishing to kill a man with bare hands, captioned: "this one goes out to my stalker! teehee wish i was joking." A named collaborator commented: "hope they d!e!!!!!" "Stalker" is not a generic word in this record. It is the specific and exclusive label applied to me in every sworn affidavit, HPO petition, police report, and piece of live court testimony filed by this family across six years of proceedings.
Chief Bardwell's written response, copied to the Northwestern District Attorney, classified the post as "part of a musical performance" that "does not clearly establish that the statements are directed toward you specifically." He issued this determination without reference to the six-year documented pattern of this family stating intentions and then delivering on them.
The Walker letter predicted the assault. The assault produced the cardiac emergency. The June 2020 mob wrote about throwing the camera in the water. She threw the phone in the river five years later. The body kept the score the department refused to keep.
Chapter 18: Joan Livingston — The Full Accounting
Joan Livingston wrote a novel about what happened to me. I do not know if she knows this. The parallel may be an act of conscience working through fiction, or a coincidence so complete that it constitutes a different kind of failure. Al Kitchen served seventeen years in prison. I have been in this town since 2008 — eighteen years, nearly the same span — served for a manufactured crime rather than a real one, without ever being charged with anything that survived a single evidentiary review.
She was editor-in-chief from December 2018 through January 2022 — precisely the years in which the machine was built, in which the founding articles were published, in which the committee met without me and the petition circulated without challenge. She published, on June 13, 2020, the following commitment: "I want to emphasize the mistakes a newspaper, including the Recorder, makes in its coverage are public mistakes. And we own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism." The promise was made. The promise was broken.
I sent approximately ten letters. No response. When I ran into her on the street, she told me the articles were in the archives and couldn't be pulled down — demonstrably false, given that they had been inaccessible for years before the August 2025 reissue. She told me she had been in cancer treatment when the articles ran and that someone else had been doing the editing. I believe her about the cancer and I am genuinely sorry she went through that. The five years of letters she did not answer were written after treatment. The paper she returned to lead, expanded her role at, and praises in her retirement announcement never published a correction.
She is now a Buckland Select Board member, sitting on the body that oversees the town whose police department personnel are named in active federal civil rights litigation. She has not corrected the record from either chair.
Her son — Zachary Livingston, co-owner of Floodwater Brewing — is the key neutral witness for the criminal prosecution of the people her paper helped protect. His sworn statement, dated December 9, 2025, documents Batteau's voluntary admission of guilt to a neutral third party. The editor's son becomes the prosecution's witness against her paper's wards. This is the structural irony of a record maintained with sufficient precision.
I gave her a heart locket once, in the years before everything fell apart. The kind of thing a neighbor gives to someone he respects. She received the emails. She lives in this town. She was the editor when the machine was assembled. She has not said so. The reviewer marvels at her empathy for ostracized outsiders. The review was published in the paper that has never corrected what it did to the man her novel is about.
PART VI: WHY IT MATTERS AND WHAT COMES NEXT
Chapter 19: The Structural Analysis — Why the Mechanisms Are Not Exotic
The mechanisms described in this record are not exotic. They are the standard operating procedures of institutions that were never required to apply their policies equally to both sides of a dispute. None of what happened required malice. It required only the absence of correction.
One-sided complaint processing requires no malice. It requires only a sergeant who writes a policy in a report and no one above him who reads it critically. A committee that holds Zoom meetings without minutes and no one external who asks to see them. A newspaper that amplifies a petition without reporting its removal and no editor who calls for a follow-up. One-sided processing is the path of least resistance. It runs itself.
Evidence expiration by inaction is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable result of a department that has never been required to canvass cameras within a defined radius, never required to document that canvass, never held accountable for the gap between what existed and what was preserved. The three cameras on November 30 — Neighbors Gas Station, Crystal Visions, the law office across State Street — were not lost through bad luck. They were allowed to reach their natural expiration dates because no one required the work.
Tom Del Negro — identified by me through the brewery window to Gilmore immediately after the assault as the initial aggressor, a known musical collaborator of Alouette Batteau — appears in the summons report only as "a male" that I "pointed at." He was never identified. He was never interviewed. The initial aggressor was erased from the official record of the violent assault he is alleged to have initiated. That is not incompetence. That is a managed record. There is a difference between an investigation that failed to identify a witness and an investigation that declined to identify one. The second is what this record documents.
HPO coaching as a neutralization strategy is not unprecedented, but it is particularly brazen when it appears in the officer's own summons report. Gilmore coaches assault defendants to file civil orders. Three courts deny my petitions — each starting fresh from the framing the coaching established. The Commonwealth imposes the stay-away at arraignment — retroactively confirming that what three courts declined to provide was warranted all along. The facts did not change between the civil proceedings and the arraignment. The institutional actor presenting them changed, and the result changed accordingly.
The Cold Cruel Sidestep deserves to be named as the mechanism it is: DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — combined with the Walkaway. The Walkaway is not mere disengagement. It is choreography. It freezes the narrative at the moment of reversal, converts a contested verbal claim into an apparent visual fact, forces the actual victim into the losing position of pursuer, exploits the heuristic that equates physical departure with moral closure, and seeds a perceptual artifact that survives long after the words have faded. Once named, the mechanism loses its sorcery. The calm departure is revealed not as proof of reasonableness but as the final brushstroke in a calculated portrait of innocence.
This mechanism operates across all scales in this record: Sonny Walters walking away after two minutes of harassment. Hennessey locking elbows and then filing the police report. Sorenson rushing from ten feet and then declaring she never touched anyone. Bardwell walking into the convenience store for coffee. The Walkaway is the closing move of the Cold Cruel Sidestep. It has been deployed against me, in one form or another, by every actor in this record at some point. It works because it exploits the most primitive layers of human social perception — the heuristic that equates calmness with innocence. The person who stays and argues looks guilty. The person who departs with composure looks wronged.
The July 2021 document is the key. One sentence. Official letterhead. Never retracted. A sitting sergeant writes that he will no longer contact the complaint subject. That sentence became the operational policy of the department for the next four years. Nobody above him said anything. The Walker letter arrived fourteen months before the assault, and Jenkins took no action. Every step was predictable. Every step was predicted. None was prevented.
Chapter 20: The Mirror — Al Kitchen and John Sendelbach
Al Kitchen, the fictional pariah of Holden, wanted only to fix his grandmother's house.
I wanted to run my studio. Make metal and stone sculptures. Help my neighbors lay concrete floors and shovel out their flooded basements. Supply the zinc and teach the technique and give away the knowledge freely. Build a Jewish memorial in a Buckland cemetery and tend the relationships that made such a request possible. Speak my mind, loudly, on camera, on a public bridge, at a protest I had every legal right to attend.
Al Kitchen ends up dead on a back road. His cousin is the only mourner. I am still here. My heart runs irregular. My nine-year studio tenancy is a memory. The CIA commission is gone. Two people who beat me in November 2025 signed pretrial no-contact conditions on the same day the newspaper that helped brand me a pariah in 2020 celebrated them on its front page.
The central difference between Al Kitchen's story and mine is the one that cuts deepest: Al Kitchen was guilty of something. He robbed a bar. He killed a man. The community's response was disproportionate and cruel, but it was not invented from nothing. It had a factual anchor.
My guilt was manufactured. Entirely. By a video that began mid-scene, after two minutes of documented harassment were edited out, posted by a woman who had just spent those two minutes making sure the confrontation happened before she hit record. By a petition removed for defamation. By a comment thread full of fabrications stated as settled fact in front of twenty-two thousand people. By a police sergeant's email giving a campaign against me its institutional blessing. By two front-page newspaper articles written without interviewing me, under the editorial leadership of a woman who had just written in print that responsible journalism means owning your mistakes and correcting them.
The town in The Unforgiving Town is called "unforgiving" because it will not forgive a man who actually did something. The town I live in manufactured the thing it refuses to forgive.
What is still standing:
The bench is still on the Bridge of Flowers. The Black Stones of Africa are still in the pavement three feet from the anti-racism plaque. The zinc bar top at Floodwater — the metal I supplied, the technique I taught, the supplier's name I gave away freely — is still being served across. The concrete floor I poured on my knees is still bearing the weight of every keg. The Sojourner Truth plaques in Florence are still anchored in the granite I drilled by hand in 2002. The Jewish memorial bench is on the Buckland hillside. Anyone can go see it. Old Diamondsides is still at the Culinary Institute of America. Brookie the Trout still leaps in River Works Park, approximately one mile from the courthouse.
My heart still runs irregular. The articles are still up. The Unforgiving Town is available for $14.99, independently published, 248 pages.
The correction would be free.
Chapter 21: The Career Reclamation — The Record Is Open
For six years, the false narrative sat in Google search results ahead of the actual work. The Recorder articles, uncorrected and actively republished with fresh indexing in August 2025, functioned as a warning label on my name in the commission market. Every potential client who Googled my name before reaching out found "disruptor," "petition," "artist's work in question" before they found the 2014 AIA Honor Award from the Western Massachusetts chapter, the Culinary Institute of America commission, the Sojourner Truth memorial in Florence.
This essay is the counter-documentation — specific, verifiable, cross-referenced against public records — that places the actual record before any potential client, collaborator, or institutional partner who wants to understand who I am and what I have actually done.
I am a metalworker, sculptor, and landscape designer with a thirty-five-year public record in western Massachusetts. That record did not change on June 6, 2020. The Black Stones of Africa are still in the pavement. The Minuteman Crossing Stone Plaza still holds the 2014 AIA Honor Award. The Sojourner Truth plaques in Florence are still anchored in the granite I drilled by hand in 2002. Brookie the Trout still leaps in River Works Park. Old Diamondsides is still at the Culinary Institute of America. The zinc bar top at Floodwater is still being served across. The concrete floor is still holding the weight.
This body of work belongs to the public record regardless of what any Facebook thread decided. I am seeking commissions. I am available. The record speaks for itself, and I am no longer willing to let a manufactured lie sit louder than it.
The six-year ordeal produced something other than damage. It produced this document. It produced the clarity that comes from having to document everything, account for everything, maintain precision under sustained pressure. It produced the understanding of exactly how institutional failure propagates — not through malice but through the absence of correction, one sergeant's report at a time. It produced the park.
Chapter 22: Mohawk Repair Institute and TransLocalism
The archive is not the destination. It is the foundation. What follows is the work that grew from the ordeal.
Mohawk Repair Institute was founded in 2026 in Shelburne Falls: a working studio, native plant nursery, and educational center. Native plant stock is grown on site for use on the Pocumtuck State Park trail network — displacing invasive species, returning the biological character of the watershed toward its pre-colonial baseline. The building's name was already Mohawk Repair when I arrived. I took it seriously — not as erasure, but as an unexpected invitation to do exactly what it says. The trail network is the living classroom. The studio is the base. The watershed is the campus.
TransLocalism is the formal name for the methodology that grew from thirty-five years of physical witness, manual production, and direct clash with the institutional patterns documented in this essay. Reparative Landscape Architecture: a practice built on the axiom of the weld. Physical reality, topographic data, hydraulic engineering, and hand-forged production hold sovereign dominion over abstract, liability-free symbolic frameworks. You cannot erase an iron weld with a Facebook comment. You cannot dismantle a duration of physical witness with a New Age marketing disclaimer. When the coaching brands dissolve and the biased articles fade to dust, the material infrastructure of the world remains. The floor is still there. The bar is still there. The bench is still there. The stones are still there.
The Mechanic Street Brook Daylighting project is one of the first major applications of TransLocalism — bypassing the bureaucratic labyrinth of town committees by executing a massive, physical, un-cancelable design solution on the town-owned 49 Mechanic Street parcel. The plan: installing a self-regulating passive flow-control structure at the historic diversion point; decommissioning the diagonal 3-by-4-foot box culvert constructed in 1961 — the documented root cause of sixty years of municipal flooding; daylighting the ancient buried riparian corridor through the historic Otter Way corridor behind the barn; deploying approximately 200 tons of local glacial stone from a multi-terraced upper-watershed flow regulator complex less than a mile away — what I call Beaver Picchu — to deliver cold, oxygenated, beaver-managed tributary flow downstream to the Deerfield River waterfront. The result: replacing a stagnant, mosquito-breeding ditch with a continuously moving, functional predatory ecosystem and watershed learning corridor connecting the Buckland-Shelburne Elementary School directly to the riverfront.
This is the same valley. The same water. The same hands.
Chapter 23: Pocumtuck State Park — The Closing Argument in Landscape
The park is the reason the archive exists. If institutions fail to repair the record, build the infrastructure that makes the record legible in the landscape itself.
Pocumtuck State Park takes its name from the people whose territory this was and whose salmon weirs were drowned by the first dam in 1798. The park's principal physical elements are not metaphors. They are engineering specifications, grant-eligible designs, and scheduled construction.
Three totems anchor the interpretive framework: Hawk Trail, Salamander, and Salmon — species whose presence and passage trace the true history of this territory and make it physically navigable on foot. The hawk follows the river. The salamander marks the upland watershed connections. The salmon, given passage, returns. Each is a living navigation system for the landscape's actual history, more accurate than any plaque.
The Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis is a stainless steel structure built to the exact dimensions of one of the J.G. Brill trolley cars that crossed the Bridge of Flowers in its original life as a streetcar trestle. It will stand at the bridge's entrance, offering morning glories for seasonal coverage and perennial climbers for long-term structure — connecting the bridge directly to the valley's transportation and industrial heritage, making the displacement visible rather than invisible. The bridge was a trolley span before it was a garden. The Trellis makes that legible to any visitor, permanently, without requiring a plaque anyone has to stop to read.
The Sojourner Truth Corridor runs north-south through the landscape, from Florence to Shelburne Falls — the axis of Black liberation history in this territory, made physically walkable. Truth was born in the North, moved through the Connecticut River valley, and her memorial plaques are anchored in granite I drilled by hand in Florence in 2002. The Corridor connects that work to this valley in a single navigable line.
Two thousand two hundred and sixty-eight QR synapses link topography to the unredacted archive — points in the landscape where a phone can be raised to connect the physical ground underfoot to the documented history of what happened here, who was here first, who was displaced, who built what, what was named and what was unnamed and why. Chrome sentinels forged from industrial debris mark the nodes.
Bioremediated salmon leaps are the biological capstone: at full fish passage restoration, the returning salmon bring 40 to 80 tons of marine-derived nitrogen annually, organic fertility returned to the soil through the bodies of returning fish, as it had been for ten thousand years before the first dam broke the cycle in 1798. The watershed feeds itself. The soil remembers.
Land Back governance: a Tri-Council of Indigenous, ecological, and narrative stewards oversees the park — not a town committee, not a select board, not a women's club organized in the same year the Klan went underground.
The closing statement:
The phone is in the Deerfield River. The record is not. The archive is open.
The correction would have been free. The park is not free — it is built from six years of documentation, cardiac episodes, studio closures, and the absolute refusal to let a manufactured verdict be the last word.
The bench is still on the Bridge of Flowers. The work continues.
You cannot weld a lie. The material infrastructure of the world outlasts the performance every single time.
APPENDIX: THE DOCUMENTED SOURCES
All primary documents available at johnsendelbach.com — no login, no fee
Police Reports:
- 21BUC-54-OF (Gilmore non-contact policy, July 13, 2021)
- 21-133-OF (Gilmore incident report confirming written non-contact policy)
- 23SHL-8-AR (false criminal harassment charge, March 2023)
- 25SHL-46-AR (Hennessey assault summons)
- 25SHL-47-AR (Batteau assault summons; contains Gilmore HPO coaching language)
- 25SHL-114-OF (November 30, 2025 incident report)
Court Dockets:
- 2641CR000158 (Commonwealth v. Hennessey: A&B ×2, Malicious Destruction of Property)
- 2641CR000159 (Commonwealth v. Batteau: A&B)
- 2541RO000063 (Hennessey HPO petition, denied with prejudice December 15, 2025)
- 2341AC000088 (Show Cause Hearing — No Probable Cause, June 6, 2023)
Federal Case:
- Mlynick v. Town of Erving et al., 3:24-cv-30108, U.S. District Court, District of Massachusetts — Judge Mark G. Mastroianni, qualified immunity denial to Jenkins personally, March 12, 2026; proceedings scheduled into 2027
Medical Documentation:
- LIFEPAK 15 monitor photograph, Massachusetts State Police barracks, October 19, 2025 — Officer Sheerer, EMS called, neutral witness
Key Primary Documents:
- Walker letters: September 6 and September 9, 2024
- Bardwell gas station video: October 16, 2025
- Hennessey December 1, 2025 affidavit (eleven documented false statements)
- December 15, 2025 hearing transcript (Judge Mazanec, third not-credible finding, denial with prejudice)
- Zachary Livingston sworn statement to Sergeant Gilmore: December 9, 2025
- June 28 and June 29, 2020 audio recordings — in the defendants' own voices; preserved; refute every sworn claim made across four and a half years of proceedings
- Sorenson/Hoberman police report: Sergeant Budrewicz, June 14, 2023
- Letter of intent to sue, Janice Sorenson: June 14, 2023
- Joanne Soroka email: August 26, 2019
Newspaper Record:
- Greenfield Recorder, June 12 and June 15, 2020, bylined Mary Byrne
- Joan Livingston "My Turn" column, June 13, 2020
- Greenfield Recorder HooPla feature, April 7, 2026 (same date as arraignments)
- August 2025 active republication of 2020 articles as "newly-added archival stories"
Personnel Decertification:
- POST Commission Order for Jacob Wrisley, Case No. 2025-020, April 2025
Change.org:
- Removal notice, June 9, 2020 — defamation and misinformation violations
Institutional Documentation:
- March 23, 2026 Alouette Batteau Instagram post (screenshot preserved; posted while parents on bail)
- Chief Bardwell written response, April 9, 2026, copied to Northwestern District Attorney
- Select Board merit raise vote record
- Public records request SPR25/2545 (zero records produced — documented civil rights violation)
- 100,000-byte archived Facebook comment ledger: June 2020 thread, 120+ participants, timestamped, preserved
- Kotright bankruptcy filing: January 29, 2021 (Kotright-Gonzalez, Joe J., Chapter 7)
- Kotright 2016 criminal record: pretrial probation, A&B family member, 209A violation
John F. Sendelbach is a metalworker, sculptor, and landscape designer with a thirty-five-year public record in western Massachusetts. He is the creator of the Stone Spring bench and the Black Stones of Africa at the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls; the Minuteman Crossing Stone Plaza at UMass Amherst (2014 AIA Honor Award, Western Massachusetts chapter); Old Diamondsides at the Culinary Institute of America; Brookie the Trout in Greenfield; the Sojourner Truth memorial plaques in Florence; and numerous permanent public installations throughout Franklin County. He is the founder of Mohawk Repair Institute and the lead designer of the Pocumtuck State Park proposal. He is available for commissions. The complete documentary record is at johnsendelbach.com. No login. No fee.
A note on documentation: Every factual claim in this piece is supported by documentary evidence — audio recordings in the defendants' own voices, police reports, court dockets, judicial findings, pretrial conditions of release, medical records, email records, sworn statements by neutral witnesses, Change.org petition records, and newspaper archives. The LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor photograph is a medical record. The June 28, 2020 audio documenting Hennessey applying the KKK label to Sendelbach — in her own voice, on her own recording — exists and directly contradicts sworn affidavits filed in four subsequent legal proceedings. All of this is verifiable. None of it has been corrected.