1. Emotional Impact
The assault of November 30, 2025 was not an isolated incident. It was the predictable endpoint of a five-year campaign of documented harassment, false police reports, and institutional abandonment that began in June 2020.
When I first learned of the June 2020 Facebook campaign against me, I experienced immediate and prolonged heart palpitations that lasted approximately three weeks. I lost approximately thirty pounds during that period. I had never experienced cardiac symptoms of that duration before. Later that year I was hospitalized and received an official diagnosis of atrial fibrillation. My physician attributed the condition to the chronic stress of the harassment campaign. I wake with cardiac episodes. Each episode returns me directly to the source of the trauma.
The pattern was not one sustained injury. It was a recurring cycle, and each cycle compounded the last.
June 2020: Three weeks of continuous heart palpitations following discovery of the Facebook campaign. Lost approximately thirty pounds. First prolonged cardiac episode of my life. Hospitalized later that year and officially diagnosed with atrial fibrillation.
March through June 2023: A false Harassment Prevention Order application required me to appear in court on an icy day when the defendant did not appear. I waited two additional weeks for a rescheduled hearing — approximately one month of sustained anxiety for a proceeding that produced nothing. Significant weight loss during this period. Then, because the court used the wrong address, I received a summons for criminal harassment charges with only ten days notice. I prepared a thorough defense. Detective Jenkins sat for nearly an hour reviewing video evidence that did not merely disprove the claims against me — it showed on screen, visibly, that the claimant had lied and had done the things she accused me of doing. He took no action. I contacted Chief Bardwell directly. He told me he trusted his officers and directed me to the DA or the Attorney General. I went to the DA's Victim Advocate office. The advocate told me it sounded like Bardwell should be doing something — and then told me it sounded like the women around town were probably scared of me because of the bad rumors going around. A victim advocate in the DA's office told me that. I brought this back to Bardwell. He refused to act. Two years later I was assaulted on a public sidewalk. No one who failed to act during those two years has acknowledged any responsibility for what their inaction enabled.
March 2025: I spent approximately three weeks writing the affidavits for the final Harassment Prevention Order hearing. I documented the escalating pattern in detail. I presented evidence that the defendants were escalating. The hearings were denied by two separate judges on March 17 and March 20. The court told me I was not in danger. Eight months later I was on the pavement outside a brewery with my arms pinned and more than thirty blows landing.
March 11-12, 2026 — The Hearing That Should Never Have Happened This Way:
This sequence requires the court's specific attention because it represents a failure of due process that compounded every prior failure and produced a documented medical emergency.
On March 11, 2026, I appeared before Judge Powers seeking a Harassment Prevention Order against Katherine Hennessey. I submitted a forty-page affidavit that included, in its appendix, the April 7, 2026 arraignment docket numbers for the criminal charges pending against both defendants. I disclosed an active atrial fibrillation emergency in open court. The defendant's attorney, who had not reviewed the case file, requested a continuance. It was granted.
On March 12, 2026, the hearing resumed. Judge Powers instructed me not to rehash prior proceedings or raise matters already in the record. This instruction created a direct denial of due process: the most important facts supporting my petition — including the three prior judicial findings that the defendant's sworn testimony was not credible, the prior vacated HPO, and the active criminal charges pending against both defendants — were in the record I was forbidden to reference. I was the victim being treated as though presenting my own case was an imposition on the court's time.
Then Judge Powers asked whether the defendant was getting arraigned — information that was explicitly listed in the appendix of the forty-page document he had implied reviewing the day before. The clerk confirmed the arraignment from a document sitting on the bench. The judge had not read the supplemental he claimed to have reviewed. The most significant fact in my petition — that the person I was seeking protection from was days away from being arraigned on criminal assault charges arising from her attack on me — was unknown to the judge presiding over my protection hearing because he had not read what I submitted.
This is not a procedural footnote. This is a judge ruling on whether an assault victim needed protection from his attacker without knowing the attacker had already been charged with assaulting him.
The defendant's attorney then conducted a cross-examination of me built entirely on fabrications from Katherine Hennessey's perjured December 1, 2025 affidavit — the same affidavit that had already been shredded at the December 15, 2025 hearing. She asked whether a specific video existed — the video that had been reviewed at length at the December 15 hearing, during which Hennessey asked if she could sit down because she did not want to watch it. The attorney had not reviewed the December 15 transcript. She had not watched the video. She had not pulled the prior case record. She recycled a fabrication that had already been adjudicated and discarded, and I was forbidden under the no-rehash instruction from telling the judge it had already been adjudicated and discarded.
During this cross-examination, in open court, the defendant made an obscene gesture — pushing her glasses up with her middle finger — directed at me. I identified it on the record. Judge Powers told me that calling it out did not help my case. She intimidated me in open court. The judge saw it. The response was to tell the victim to stop noticing.
A bailiff, at one point during the proceeding, shouted directly into my hearing-impaired ear. I had disclosed my hearing impairment. The court did not intervene.
The hearing triggered a six-day atrial fibrillation episode that did not resolve until March 17, 2026. The proceeding designed to protect me from ongoing harm produced six days of documented cardiac crisis.
Each of these cycles came with its own sustained period of atrial fibrillation. This is not a manageable inconvenience. Atrial fibrillation carries documented risk of stroke, heart attack, and permanent cardiac disability. On October 19, 2025 — six weeks before the assault — a State Police officer became so concerned about my cardiac state during a testimony session that he insisted on calling EMS over my objection. The Stryker LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor recorded my heart rate fluctuating between 130 and 230 beats per minute. That reading is documented and photographed. That was my baseline condition going into November 30, 2025. The assault occurred in a body already in documented cardiac crisis from five years of sustained threat exposure.
I have since identified symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. I cannot enter certain parts of Shelburne Falls — including both bridges, my own public artwork, and the street where my studio is located — without experiencing acute anxiety. I have left a light on in my apartment continuously for six years. I did not used to lock my door. I now lock it every time I leave. I live with the awareness that one of the 20,000 people who viewed the original video — a video whose comment thread included documented death threats against me — may still intend to act on those threats. That awareness does not diminish. It has been present every day for six years.
The most difficult aspect of this experience to articulate is what might be called the feedback loop of false pariah-dom. Every attempt I made to correct the record — the police reports I filed, the HPO petitions, the public documentation — was processed by the community and the institutions around me as evidence of instability rather than evidence of harm. My legitimate efforts to seek accountability were recoded as obsession. The defense of my own record was treated as confirmation of the designation. This created a condition researchers describe as social vertigo: I remained the same person, my work remained the same, my documented record remained the same — yet I was treated as an alien element in my own community. That condition does not resolve when the court proceedings end. It was installed by what these defendants set in motion and it runs without them now.
I want the court to understand that the institutional abandonment documented in this case predates June 6, 2020. In August 2019 — nine months before the Iron Bridge confrontation — a sitting member of the Bridge of Flowers Committee sent me a threatening email stating: "Keep hitting me and I will not hesitate. 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 Sergeant Gilmore in 2020. Police took no action. That committee member subsequently recused herself from the June 2020 deliberations about my work without disclosing the email. The institutional abandonment did not begin with the petition. The petition activated a structure that was already hostile.
My relationship with my partner has been severely damaged by this five-year ordeal. The sustained anxiety of this situation affected her health directly. I made an agreement with her that I would not discuss the case with her in order to protect her, which meant I had no support system for the duration of this five-year ordeal. I researched, documented, and prepared legal filings in complete isolation.
My father died during this period. My mother died during this period. My remaining siblings are distant and occupied with their own families. I have had no institutional support — not from the police, not from the select board, not from the Bridge of Flowers Committee, not from the courts prior to this prosecution. I exhausted every available avenue before this assault finally produced criminal charges.
The most persistent damage is not the people I know oppose me. It is that I can no longer distinguish them from everyone else. A woman who crosses the street may be reacting to a six-year-old lie or she may simply be going somewhere. I cannot know. I used to know. That loss — of basic social legibility in the community I built things for — is not something that resolves when the court proceedings end. It was installed by what these defendants set in motion and it runs without them now. It is a daily part of my existence, wondering if this person or that person is believing the lies. That is what a false designation does when it goes uncorrected for six years. It becomes ambient. It becomes the water.
The April 7, 2026 arraignment hearing itself produced additional trauma rather than relief. On two separate occasions before the hearing began, the defendant made an obscene gesture directed at me — pushing her glasses up with her middle finger, repeating the motion multiple times while looking directly at me, then switching hands and repeating it again. This was deliberate. This was in a courtroom while awaiting arraignment on charges of assaulting me. This was the second time she had done this in a courtroom — she had done it at the March 12 hearing as well, in open court, while I was attempting to present evidence of her assault against me, and when I identified it the judge told me it did not help my case.
During the April 7 hearing, the defendant's attorney interrogated me based entirely on the defendant's account rather than any independent review of the documented record. Every line of questioning was built on the defendant's lies. I was forced to dismantle each one in real time, without counsel, in front of a judge. In her closing statement she repeated the same false claims anyway. I am asking the court to review the courtroom video from both March 12 and April 7, 2026. I am confident the gestures are documented on both dates.
That is what five years of non-custodial non-consequences produces. It produces a defendant who intimidates her assault victim in two separate courtrooms — once at a protection hearing and once at her own arraignment — and faces no consequence for either.
2. Physical Impact
On November 30, 2025 I sustained more than thirty blows to the head and face while my arms were pinned from behind. My eyeglasses were dislodged. I was knocked off a curb by the initial assault. I was struck a second time from behind after the defendant had already walked seventy-five feet to throw my phone into the Deerfield River.
I did not strike back. I curled and covered my head.
The atrial fibrillation condition previously diagnosed — attributed by my physician to the chronic stress of the harassment campaign — means that sustained blows to the head and chest carry elevated risk beyond what they would for a person without this condition. As documented six weeks before the assault, my resting cardiac state was already recording at 130 to 230 beats per minute under stress. The assault occurred in the context of a body already compromised by five years of documented physiological stress response. A cardiac emergency was triggered by the assault. EMS attached the LIFEPAK 15 monitor on scene.
Total cost of medical treatment: [to be confirmed with physician] Insurance coverage: [to be confirmed]
3. Financial Impact
Immediate property loss: One smartphone, thrown into the Deerfield River by the defendant while still recording the assault. The screen was lit and visible as it arced into the water.
Property damage: iPhone SE, replacement value $1,099.99 per documented receipt Amount covered by insurance: [to be confirmed]
Career destruction: I am a metalworker, sculptor, and landscape designer with thirty years of permanent public installations across western Massachusetts. Following the June 2020 campaign, a Greenfield Recorder Facebook post summarizing the petition to remove my work — over 600 signatures before being removed by Change.org for defamation and misinformation violations — remained indexed on the first page of Google search results for my name. It remains there six years later despite approximately twelve documented attempts to have it corrected or removed, including a direct conversation with the former editor.
The practical consequence: any institution, commissioner, or client researching my name encounters that post before reaching my portfolio. I cannot advertise effectively. I have not pursued commissions at the scale my career previously operated at because the reputational damage makes professional engagement effectively impossible. I have sustained my income through an eBay resale operation — work entirely unrelated to my thirty-year profession — for five years.
Prior to 2020 I had active institutional relationships with UMass Amherst, the Culinary Institute of America, Deerfield Academy, and municipal clients across the region. None of those relationships have produced work since the campaign began. I cannot calculate the precise dollar value of the commissions I did not receive because I cannot prove which institutions searched my name and decided not to call. I can state that the mechanism of that loss is documented and that it began with this campaign and continues today.
I was forced to vacate my studio at 44 State Street after nine years of continuous operation as a direct result of the 2020 campaign. I subsequently relocated twice more under pressure connected to the same defendants. Three studios. Five years. One campaign.
4. Sentence Recommendation
I am asking this court to impose a custodial sentence on Catherine Hennessey.
She declared hatred to my face on video in June 2020: "Yeah, I hate you. Really do. That's not against the law. I can hate you all I want." Every subsequent time I attempted to correct the record with her she responded with an escalation — another false report, another legal filing, another letter to my landlord, and ultimately physical assault. That pattern, combined with her family's documented expressions of racial contempt directed at me — her husband telling me on video to "quit your white whining," her daughter posting that she is "around far too many white people" — demonstrates that this is not a person who responds to non-custodial consequences.
The charges before this court represent the floor of the documented record, not its ceiling.
The charges — Assault and Battery times two and Malicious Destruction of Property — represent the events of a single afternoon and evening. They do not represent the full documented record of Katherine Hennessey's conduct toward me across six years.
The morning of November 30, 2025 alone contains uncharged criminal conduct. She drove onto my rented property without invitation or legitimate purpose, pulled directly to my parked vehicle past the store entrance where her stated errand would have ended, gave me the middle finger twice, mouthed profanity at me, and drove away. I called police within twenty minutes. An officer responded, took my statement, and did nothing. Sergeant Gilmore subsequently reviewed that officer's bodycam footage. He also did nothing. No charge was filed for the morning trespass despite two separate officers having direct knowledge of it within hours of the event.
The failure to secure the gas station security footage — which would have documented the trespass on camera — fell on the responding officer and on Sergeant Gilmore. I subsequently attempted to locate that footage with my current landlord, spending approximately twenty to twenty-five minutes searching the system without a timestamp because my phone had been in the river since the prior night. That landlord is the one I was forced to find because Katherine Hennessey's defamatory letters to my previous landlord made that tenancy untenable. The investigating officer's failure to secure footage of a crime committed on the property of the very landlord that Hennessey's prior conduct had driven me to is not incidental. It is the institutional pattern completing one more cycle.
The June 6, 2020 originating event — in which she got within twelve inches of my face with fists clenched, locked elbows with another person to physically block my path, and stalked me across the Iron Bridge — was witnessed by police officers who stood and watched. She stated in the documented discussion thread that it was her explicit goal to move me along. She did what she stated her intention was. That is not protected speech. That is documented criminal harassment with sworn law enforcement witnesses present. No charge was ever filed for that event.
The conduct before this court is the endpoint of a documented pattern that the charging documents only partially capture. The sentence should reflect the full pattern, not only its final expression.
The false report pattern — documented floor, not ceiling.
Katherine Hennessey filed a documented pattern of false police reports against me between 2020 and 2025. Eight were compiled by Detective Pettengill and co-signed by Detective Jenkins into a single criminal harassment show-cause that produced a No Probable Cause finding on June 6, 2023 — docket 2341AC000088 — after a clerk magistrate reviewed the actual video evidence for approximately one hour. Those eight are documented. They are not the complete picture.
In August 2025 I submitted a formal public records request to the Shelburne Falls Police Department specifically to obtain the full record of complaints filed against me. As of the date of this statement that request has produced not a single document — despite a ruling from the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, a reduction in scope I voluntarily provided at the department's request, and an extended deadline I agreed to. Chief Bardwell first attempted to charge approximately $2,150 for the records. When I reduced the scope, he requested additional time rather than producing what was available without cost. The records have never arrived.
I cannot state the full number of false police reports because the department holding those records has not produced them. What I can state is that the eight compiled by Pettengill and Jenkins are the floor, not the ceiling, and that the department's refusal to produce its own records in a case where its own conduct is part of the documented pattern is not clerical delay. It is the permission structure that enabled five years of false reporting extending itself one more time.
The perjury pattern — three witnessed instances, zero referrals.
Katherine Hennessey swore falsely before this court on at least three separate occasions across four years. A sitting judge witnessed her perjury in real time during the 2021 Sonny Walters hearing — she denied locking her elbows to block my path while the video played on screen showing her doing exactly that. The same judge denied her March 2023 HPO after finding her claims contradicted by the audio record. The same judge denied her December 1, 2025 HPO with prejudice after spending fourteen minutes reviewing video that directly contradicted every material claim in her affidavit, stating on the record that he did not believe her and that he believed me. Three documented instances of witnessed perjury before the same judge across four years. Not once was she referred for perjury prosecution. Not once did the false sworn statement cost her anything beyond the immediate denial.
The assault of November 30, 2025 is the direct and foreseeable consequence of a system that imposed no cost on repeated perjury by the same person before the same court. This court now has the opportunity to impose a consequence proportionate to what that pattern produced.
She sought two Harassment Prevention Orders against me. The first, in March 2023, was vacated by Judge Mazanec after I presented audio directly contradicting her death threat claim — my actual words were "I will never get along with the likes of you," recorded while she was laughing. The second was filed the morning of December 1, 2025 — the morning after she assaulted me and threw my recording device into the Deerfield River — before I had a replacement phone and before I could file my own report. She filed for protection against the man she had beaten the night before, as a preemptive legal maneuver, while the evidence of her assault was sinking in the river. That filing was denied with prejudice by Judge Mazanec, who also made two additional independent findings across these proceedings that her testimony was not credible. Three findings of not credible. Not one perjury referral from any proceeding.
She wrote a letter to my landlord in September 2024 predicting that "it's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt" — fourteen months before she assaulted me. She declined the landlord's offer of funded mediation. She has never been held accountable for any of this prior conduct.
She has had five years of non-custodial non-consequences and they produced a beating on a public sidewalk followed by courtroom intimidation at her own arraignment. I am asking for jail time.
The institutional failure — documented and ongoing.
I am also asking this court to note, for the record, the specific and documented failure of the Shelburne Falls Police Department and its Chief to intervene when intervention was both possible and repeatedly requested.
The institutions that failed to protect me did not fail through malice in most cases. They chose the path of least resistance — the performative gesture calibrated to the prevailing narrative — while the permanent documented reality of my thirty-year record was made invisible through bureaucratic silence. That is not an excuse. It is an explanation of how a man can be destroyed in a community where nobody had to be evil. The machinery only required people to be busy, to value cognitive ease, and to defer to institutional authority. This court is the first institution in six years that cannot make that choice. I am asking it not to.
In August 2025 I submitted a formal public records request to the Shelburne Falls Police Department seeking documentation that would have directly corroborated my claims regarding the pattern of harassment. As documented above, the request yielded nothing. No records were ever produced despite a ruling from the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Chief Bardwell at one point asked me to prepare a presentation of the evidence for him before he would consider taking action — evidence that already existed in the court record, on video, in sworn statements, and on a thumb drive the court held. He asked me to reassemble and re-present material that was already documented and already before the court. That is not a good-faith request for information. It is an instruction to retraumatize myself in order to justify action the existing record already warranted.
In November 2025 — weeks before the assault — I encountered Chief Bardwell at a gas station and raised my concerns directly. He told me he could not charge people for filing false reports — a statement that is factually incorrect under Massachusetts law, and which is captured on video. He then referred me to the Attorney General. The Attorney General's office handles systemic civil rights violations and major public corruption — it is not the appropriate venue for individual false police report complaints at the local level. I had already been to the DA's office, which had told me this matter was Bardwell's responsibility. The circle was complete: the DA said it was the chief's job; the chief said he lacked the authority he actually possessed; the chief then sent me to an office that does not handle matters of this kind. No one acted. The assault occurred weeks later.
The through-line is this: I went to the police. I went to the courts. I went to the DA's office. I went directly to the Chief of Police in person. I submitted formal records requests. I appeared at five separate court hearings seeking protection from escalating conduct. At each step I was told there was not enough, that I was not in danger, that I should try somewhere else, or that I should prepare yet another presentation of evidence that already existed. At one hearing I was forbidden from referencing the prior record while simultaneously being cross-examined on fabrications drawn from that same record. At another I disclosed a life-threatening cardiac emergency and was subjected to a six-day episode as a direct consequence of how the proceeding was conducted. The assault is not only the product of the defendant's conduct. It is partly the product of a system that had every opportunity to intervene and declined each time, while the escalation I was documenting continued uninterrupted toward its inevitable conclusion.
Regarding Brook Batteau: his role, while criminal, was a single physical act without the five-year premeditation record that characterizes the Hennessey case. I leave his sentence to the court's discretion.
The Black Stones of Africa remain in the pavement on the Bridge of Flowers. I remain in this community. I am asking this court to make that mean something.
John F. Sendelbach Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts June 2026