The People Who Started This and the People Who Disappeared
by John F. Sendelbach
On June 6, 2020, Katherine Hennessey, Brook Batteau, Sonny Walters, and Alouette Batteau showed up on the bridges of Shelburne Falls to protest police violence. They carried signs. They made speeches. They used words like "accountability" and "systemic" and "complicity." They filmed. They posted. They got twenty-two thousand views.
I was there too. I was there because I live there. I was there because my studio is there. I was there because I was documenting an unannounced street closure near my own building and nobody had told me it was coming.
Within approximately two minutes, Sonny Walters approached me and refused to leave me alone despite repeated requests. Katherine Hennessey closed to within inches of my face with her fists clenched while I was backed against the bridge railing. I broke free and walked away. They followed. I turned around. They followed again. Hennessey locked elbows with another person to physically block my path.
Four separate moments when any one of them could have simply stopped. None of them did.
In the same recorded exchange, Brook Batteau directed a racial slur at me — "Quit your white whining" — and Katherine Hennessey stated on camera: "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."
Within three weeks Brook Batteau told me directly that I was now bad for business in this town.
Alouette Batteau filmed the entire sequence, removed the context of my repeated attempts to disengage — three separate times before her clip begins — and posted the edited version publicly. It has never come down. What she did has a name in Massachusetts law. It is called false light invasion of privacy under M.G.L. c. 214 §3B. It means deliberately placing a person in a false light before the public in a manner that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person. The argument for criminal exposure is not frivolous. The video has been up for six years. The people who marched for accountability have not mentioned it.
Now here is the detail that completes the picture. The one that belongs in a frame on the wall of every civics classroom in western Massachusetts.
Katherine Hennessey, at this anti-cop rally, flagged down police officers and asked them to remove me.
Let that land.
She organized around the premise that police are instruments of oppression not to be trusted to police their communities. She held the signs. She gave the speeches. She stood on the bridge in the moral posture of the aggrieved and the righteous. And in the same two minutes, on the same bridge, at the same rally, she used cops as her personal removal service against the one person present who had done nothing but ask to be left alone.
The officers she flagged did not act. But she asked. At an anti-cop rally. To remove a man standing on a public bridge doing his constitutionally protected job.
This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. Ordinary hypocrisy is believing one thing and doing another out of weakness or convenience. This is something more deliberate: using the language and symbols of accountability as a shield while deploying the exact apparatus you claim to oppose as a weapon. The protest was cover. The cops were a tool. Both were aimed at the same target.
What followed was not a series of isolated bad decisions. It was a coordinated campaign. Katherine Hennessey, Brook Batteau, and Alouette Batteau acting in concert, pursuant to a common plan, through sustained defamation, false police reports, perjured court filings, physical assault, and ongoing harassment. That is not rhetoric. That is the legal definition of civil conspiracy, and it is what six years of documented record establishes.
Here is what that target experienced in the years that followed.
Detective Tucker Jenkins spent nearly an hour reviewing video that directly disproved the claims filed against me. He took no action. Chief Jason Bardwell told me on video he could not charge false police reports — factually incorrect under Massachusetts law — then sent me to the Attorney General's office, whose director's brother was simultaneously awaiting trial on twenty-one counts of sexual assault. Alvin Campbell has since been sentenced to life. The referral was a dismissal dressed as a solution.
Sergeant Kurt Gilmore wrote a document in July 2021 establishing that engaging with my complaints "hasn't worked in the past." He wrote this fourteen months before the Walker letter arrived predicting someone would get hurt, and fifty-two months before someone did. On the night of November 30, 2025, after Brook Batteau shoved me off a curb and jumped me and Katherine Hennessey pinned my arms and beat my face freely, Gilmore left his cruiser running and unattended while the assault victim he had agreed to meet waited outside a dark building for fifteen minutes with no phone. When he came out, he interviewed me, drove to the defendants' residence, and interviewed them in their living room. The following morning he called to say he was surprised the HPO filing had come from their direction. That statement documented what his report did not: he had advised the assault defendants to seek civil protection orders against their victim before completing his criminal investigation.
Officer Pettengill reviewed my video of a man who had trapped me at my car window in a threatening manner with expired registration. He agreed the driver was aggressive. He confirmed the expired plates. He called me and said — his exact words — "I am not trying to blow smoke up your ass, but if I charge him with anything, I have to charge you with driving while filming." He did nothing to the aggressor. Ten days later Pettengill personally pulled the same driver on Route 2 and stood by while he obtained roadside assistance and drove away clean. Pettengill then filed a criminal harassment complaint against me — without ever having met me — co-signed by Jenkins, who had also never met me. Eight accusations. The HPO attempt failed when I presented my evidence. Six weeks later they brought the identical paper to a show cause hearing. No probable cause. Same charges, two proceedings. That is malicious prosecution. Pettengill wrote the document that made it possible.
When I filed a two-party consent complaint against my landlord Brad Walker — who had crossed onto private property and recorded me without consent, a potential felony under M.G.L. c. 272 §99 — Pettengill responded, reviewed the situation, turned off his body camera, and said: "If it was me I'd press charges myself." Then he did nothing. The camera was off. He made sure of that before he spoke.
Walker had already told arriving officers that I "always act like an asshole" without reviewing my video evidence, received Katherine Hennessey's defamatory letters alleging I harassed women around town, sat on them, and passed them to Jenkins rather than to me. He became the civilian relay between the Hennessey-Batteau network and the institutional machinery — keeping the narrative moving through channels I could not see and could not answer. He also offered another landlord $2,000 to take me as a tenant, engineering my removal from my own commercial space through financial inducement rather than lawful process. He told me about this himself.
On the morning of the arraignment, the Greenfield Recorder published a glowing front-page profile of Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau. The paper's editor is Joan Livingston. Her son is Zachary Livingston — the Commonwealth's key neutral witness. The Recorder published three articles in the summer of 2020 framing the campaign against me as community accountability. It did not contact me for any of them. The circle of institutions in this town is not large, and once you map it, the gaps in the coverage make as much sense as the coverage itself.
In September 2024 — fourteen months before the assault — Hennessey wrote to Walker requesting my eviction, describing a police-cleared incident as harassment by me. That letter contained this sentence: "It's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." Jenkins received it twelve days late. He filed no report. Issued no warning. Conducted no interview. Took no action of any kind. Fourteen months later she hurt me.
Katherine Hennessey filed eight to nine false police reports against me between 2020 and 2025. She swore falsely before courts on at least four documented occasions across five years. A sitting judge witnessed her perjury in real time. The same judge denied her HPO applications in 2021, 2023, and December 2025 — the last one with prejudice after reviewing video that directly contradicted every material claim in her affidavit. Four judicial findings of non-credibility before the same judge across four years. Each one a separate legal proceeding instituted without probable cause and terminated in my favor. Not one referral for perjury prosecution.
I appeared before five separate courts seeking protection from escalating conduct. Told each time I was not in danger. On March 17 and March 20, 2026, two judges denied my HPO applications. Eight months later I was on the pavement outside Floodwater Brewery with my arms pinned, more than thirty blows landing, watching the lit screen of my still-recording iPhone arc into the Deerfield River from thirty feet away.
On April 7, 2026, at the arraignment, Hennessey performed sustained deliberate obscene gestures across the courtroom aisle at me, switching hands, repeating the gesture four to five times as she was led toward the hallway, maintaining direct eye contact throughout. This occurred under active courtroom video surveillance while bail conditions were being set. The bail conditions did not deter that conduct. They did not deter her June 2026 public expression of hostility toward Zachary Livingston at a social gathering while charges were pending. They did not deter the June 12 vehicle approach within stay-away distance of my property.
Alouette Batteau posted a video titled "John Sendelbach Part Two" naming me explicitly. Her March 23, 2026 Instagram post — "I never wished so much to kill a man with my bare hands," captioned "this one goes out to my stalker" — produced an acute cardiac episode when combined with Chief Bardwell's written response characterizing it as a musical performance that did not clearly establish the statements were directed toward me. The word stalker is the specific and exclusive label this family has applied to me in every sworn affidavit, HPO petition, police report, and piece of live court testimony across six years. They invented a role for me and have never deviated from it. The consistency is the tell.
After the April 7, 2026 arraignment — after entering a plea of not guilty to Assault and Battery charges for his role in a sidewalk beating that sent me into documented atrial fibrillation — Brook Batteau filmed a music video at Trinity Church. The stained glass windows of the sanctuary served as the visual backdrop. Rev. Kate Stevens is the pastor of Trinity Church. Brook Batteau is the church secretary. Trinity Church has not responded to any communication about this.
The Performers
Now I want to talk about the people who showed up for the signs and disappeared for the work.
Rev. Kate Stevens wrote in the Greenfield Recorder on June 20, 2020: "We need to listen; we need to learn the real United States history and hear all the stories that have not been told."
She traveled 6,000 miles through the South in 2018 to study civil rights history — the Equal Justice Initiative's National Museum of Peace and Justice in Birmingham, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the sites of Bloody Sunday. She said the church should be a moral leader. She said seeing others as beloved human beings is the very heart of ministry.
On June 6, 2020, she helped organize the Iron Bridge protest. She recruited peacekeepers. She personally instructed me to put on a mask at that event. She was therefore directly aware of my presence. Her husband John was visible in the documentation while the crowd encircled me.
Katherine Hennessey — the woman who would spend the next five years filing eight unverified police reports against me before physically assaulting me on a public sidewalk — was one of the peacekeepers Stevens recruited.
In the six years since that day, Rev. Stevens has published letters in the Recorder about community support for local pharmacies, hospital nurses, and various civic causes. She has said nothing about what happened to me. Not then. Not after the assault. Not after the arraignment. Not after her church secretary was criminally charged. Not after he filmed a music video in her sanctuary two weeks after entering a not guilty plea.
She wrote: "Things have to reverberate in the minds and hearts of white people for change to happen."
She wrote: "We need to put our bodies where our principles reside."
She wrote: "We have to decide who we support."
She published these words. She organized events around them. She recruited the peacekeeper who became the assailant. And when the reverberation she called for arrived in her own community, in documented form, with court dockets and police reports and judicial findings and a criminal arraignment — she said nothing.
The stories that have not been told are all at johnsendelbach.com. No login. No fee. She has had six years to ask.
Then there is the daisy-chain walk. In August 2025 the Recorder ran a piece on the "Count the Cost" walk in Shelburne Falls — a handful of familiar faces looping through the village in a performative gesture. Signs. Presence. The appearance of moral weight without the weight. I wrote to the Recorder at the time: only 215 people had signed the petition to remove Detective Tucker Jenkins in a town of roughly 3,400 residents. Had any of the daisy-chain regulars added their names?
The answer, as best I can determine, is no. The walk happened. The petition sat at 215. The familiar faces went home.
This is what performative activism produces in practice: a social ritual that functions as a substitute for action rather than a path to it. Signs are easy. Petitions require commitment to a specific named wrong. The walk says we care about justice in the abstract. The petition says we care about this specific detective in this specific town who processed eight unverified reports against a named person without a single interview. The walk draws a crowd. The petition draws accountability. The crowd dispersed. The petition sat at 215.
Michael Hoberman, Ph.D., is a Professor of English at Fitchburg State University specializing in Jewish American history and literature. He is a Fulbright Scholar. He has published with Rutgers University Press and Oxford University Press. He delivered a public lecture entitled "Only In America: Anti-Semitism" at the Sunderland Public Library in September 2024. His entire scholarly identity is built around knowing what antisemitism is, what evidence is required to establish it, and how communities polarize around unverified accusations.
On June 14, 2023, on a public sidewalk in Buckland, he looked at me — a man he had never spoken a single word to in his life — and said: "You are an antisemite."
He said it without a quote. Without a witness. Without a single piece of documented evidence. He said it while pulling his partner away from me after she had rushed me with her fists clenched from ten feet away.
Nine years before that moment I had built a polished stone memorial bench on a Buckland hillside for a Jewish family — the Garfield Wrights — hauling large stones from their property, polishing one by hand, designing it to receive a bronze plaque telling Susan Garfield Wright's story. When I finished the installation, Amazing Grace played on the chimes in the bell tower of the nearby church. I had never heard it live before. I stopped working. It was one of the most moving experiences of my thirty-five-year career.
Michael Hoberman said "you are an antisemite" to the man who built that bench. Without evidence. Without a quote. Without a witness. On a sidewalk. In front of his partner.
I filed a police report. I sent a civil demand letter with a settlement offer of one hundred thousand dollars, with an explicit willingness to accept published apology letters in lieu of financial damages. I sent communications to Fitchburg State University. No response to any of it. The university's general counsel has received communication. The response has been silence.
In a February 2026 interview Hoberman said that reducing complex human encounters to flat accusations of bigotry is "just not particularly interesting. It would be one more story we've all heard before too many times."
He said that six months after saying "you are an antisemite" to a man he had never met, on a sidewalk, without evidence.
The accusation of antisemitism is either supported by evidence or it is not. This one is not. There is no evidence. There has never been any evidence. The bench is on the hillside. Anyone can go see it. Fitchburg State University has said nothing about the contradiction between their tenured professor's published scholarly standards and his street conduct. The regional Jewish institutional community has said nothing. No response from anyone whose stated purpose includes protecting the integrity of that charge from weaponization.
When a credentialed scholar of Jewish American history deploys the accusation of antisemitism as a street weapon — without evidence, against a man with a thirty-five year documented record of public art in this community — and when that deployment is met with complete institutional silence from the entities whose purpose includes protecting the integrity of that charge, those institutions are participating in the devaluation of the very history they claim to protect.
The Pattern
This is what I have come to call the Cold Cruel Sidestep. It is an extension of Jennifer Freyd's DARVO model — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — with a fourth phase added: strategic disengagement. After denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender roles, the actor disengages through silence, refusal of dialogue, and exclusion from institutional processes — leaving the target to continue documenting alone, while that very persistence is recoded as instability.
Rev. Stevens writes about racial justice and says nothing about the man her peacekeeper assaulted.
The daisy-chain walkers loop through the village and cannot produce 215 signatures on a petition naming a specific wrong.
A professor of antisemitism deploys the charge without evidence and his university says nothing.
A church secretary is criminally arraigned for assault and films a music video in the sanctuary two weeks later.
The Recorder publishes a front-page profile of the defendants on the morning of their arraignment and says nothing about the editor's son being the Commonwealth's key witness.
Brad Walker tells police the victim always acts like an asshole and offers another landlord $2,000 to take him off his hands.
None of these people coordinated on a Tuesday morning to produce this outcome. They didn't have to. Institutions and communities maintain narrative hegemony not through conspiracy but through the path of least resistance. The music video gets filmed. The newsletter gets published. The walk happens. The email goes unanswered. The petition sits at 215. The narrative holds.
Performative activism is not just useless in this context. It is actively harmful. It creates the appearance of a community that cares about justice while providing cover for the specific injustices that community's members are committing or enabling. The signs say we oppose police brutality. The signatures say we oppose this specific detective. The signs drew a crowd. The signatures required people to put their name on something real. The crowd dispersed. The detective kept his job until a federal judge denied him qualified immunity.
The signs were never about accountability. They were about belonging. About being seen on the right side of a moment. About the social currency that comes from public moral performance in a small New England village where everyone knows everyone and the cost of performing is low and the cost of actually opposing someone you know is very high.
I know this because I paid that cost. I am still paying it.
The Bill
I have atrial fibrillation. I have lost my studio — twice, two consecutive commercial evictions caused by the same defamatory network. I have sold eighty percent of my professional inventory at scrap value. I have not slept without locking my door in six years. My father died during this. My mother died during this. I have had no meaningful institutional support — not from the police, not from the select board, not from the courts prior to this prosecution, not from the press, not from the minister who recruited the peacekeeper who became the assailant, not from the professor who knows what antisemitism requires as evidence, not from the daisy-chain walkers who cannot produce 215 signatures on a specific wrong in a town of 3,400 people.
I have been called a KKK member, a child predator, a woman hater, a racist, and an antisemite. Every accusation without a single piece of supporting evidence. While the institutions of this community processed those accusations without ever interviewing me. While the people who made them have faced criminal arraignment for assaulting me.
The charges before this court represent the floor of the documented record, not its ceiling. Two civil complaints are now drafted. Seven counts in one. Six in the other. Civil conspiracy. Malicious prosecution. False light. Assault and battery. Defamation. Destruction of property. Constructive eviction. Tortious interference. Two-party consent violation. The full documented record of what six years of confirmed impunity produces when institutions confirm at every step that conduct carries no cost.
And the people who built that ceiling are still in this community. Still going to the events. Still on the committees. Still organizing the walks. Still writing the letters about the pharmacy and the nurses. Still telling the story their way. Still getting twenty-two thousand views.
The anti-cop movement and the cop apparatus turned out to want the same thing. They just used different paperwork.
Accountability, it turns out, is easy when it points away from you.
Cops are useless, Katherine Hennessey said.
She said it in a documented thread. She meant it as a complaint.
She's been trying to prove otherwise ever since. False reports. HPO petitions. Letters to landlords. Show cause hearings. Criminal complaints filed by officers who had never met me. Death-wish posts on Instagram while on bail. Each one an attempt to get some institutional actor to do what the cops declined to do on the bridge that afternoon — remove me from a public space for the crime of being there with a camera.
They worked for her eventually.
They just took six years, two evictions, two dead parents, a heart condition, a professor who forgot what evidence means, a minister who forgot what ministry means, a church secretary who filmed his post-arraignment music video in the sanctuary, a daisy-chain walk that couldn't produce 215 signatures on a specific wrong, and thirty blows to get there.
The bill is now being presented.
— J.F.S., Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, July 2026