How Massachusetts’ Progressive Managerial Class Inherited the Horticultural Blueprint of the Invisible Empire, Weaponized the Myth of the Patriarchy, and Engineered the Shelburne Falls Star Chamber

How Massachusetts’ Progressive Managerial Class Inherited the Horticultural Blueprint of the Invisible Empire, Weaponized the Myth of the Patriarchy, and Engineered the Shelburne Falls Star Chamber

John F. Sendelbach · Sculptor · Shelburne Falls · 2026

This is not a civic letter. It is a compiled record. I am the man they tried to turn into a ghost, and I am still holding the paper.

Two dockets first, so nobody can pretend the rest is atmosphere: Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey, 2641CR0158; Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau, 2641CR0159. Northwestern District Attorney letterhead. Jaime Baker, Victim/Witness. Judge William Mazanec, Greenfield District Court, July 28, 2026. Both submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery. Both walked out on a six-month continuance without a finding and a fifty-yard stay-away. Hennessey separately had malicious destruction of property under $1,200 continued generally under G.L. c. 276, § 87, on a not-guilty plea, with $429.99 restitution — the phone in the Deerfield, priced. That is the statute. That is not a slogan.

What follows is first person because I was there. A narrative is not evidence of the events it describes. A letter from the District Attorney is. A September 2024 eviction demand to a landlord is. A Facebook comment edited three times in twenty-four hours is. Where I am remembering, I will say so. Where I am inferring, I will say that too.

One frame, up front, so the ending cannot be quoted without it: the closer that toys with the Nineteenth Amendment is a dare, not a bill. If that sentence is the only thing anyone reprints, they will have confessed what they came for.

The cultural script says power flows down from a male patriarchy. The six-year file in this village says the operators who moved the story were women, named, credentialed, and unwilling to break ranks, and that the men in uniform and robes mostly carried the water until one of them put his hands on me and the Commonwealth captioned him too. I am done sanding the sex off the roster to make the paragraph respectable.

I. The roster is not a vibe

Walters. Hennessey. Batteau. Cavanaugh-Green. Kingsley. Szpila. Angus. Lofquist. Soroka. Berenson. Livingston. Byrne. Iveson. Stevens. Anderson. Sorenson. Rolon.

Read it again. Those are not weather. Those are not “people who happen to be women.” That is the civic, media, petition, and title-holding line that took a sculptor off the span and kept him off it. A club that will not break ranks. A newsroom that would not correct. A commissioner who edited a comment three times rather than delete a docket that was not there. I will give them first names as the acts require. I will keep hitting the last names so the eye cannot slide off into a fog of “community.”

Sonseniora Walters amplified the thread and told the circle she had years of seeing the pattern in me. Catherine Hennessey — Kate, in the emails she signed — wrote the landlord, swore the December affidavit, stood in the dock on July 28. Alouette Batteau, who the same letter names Lou, is the household node and the 2020 camera. Bianca Cavanaugh-Green put the petition in public. The committee names — Kingsley, Szpila, Angus, Lofquist, Soroka — sat on the private club that treats a public bridge like a parlor. Kay Berenson came out of the Recorder and into the closed Zooms. Mary Byrne wrote the COVID-and-conduct weather. Laura Iveson kept the Art Garden flame and co-signed the civic sweetness. Stevens ran in the same copy stream. Rhonda Anderson, Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, put a state title on a restraining-order claim she then walked back. Sorenson and Rolon kept the circle closed. The committee minutes that would let a citizen watch the vote still have not been produced.

That list is women. I am going to keep saying women until the sentence stops being treated like an accident of pronouns. The move that wrecked the work was not a mixed committee that happened to have female members. It was a female-dominated enforcement choir that decided the artist was the problem and then trained every downstream office to hum the same bar.

The men are not missing. They are downstream, or they are the one man the DA finally wrote down.

Sergeant Kurt Gilmore took the calls and wrote the narratives — including 23BUC-7-OF, March 2023, in which Hennessey converted my lunch spot into a hunt. Officers whose names sit on 21BUC-54-OF and the later arrest numbers processed one ledger and sat on the other. Judges signed harassment-prevention paper and, later, the July 28 conditions. David E. Sullivan’s office sent me the victim letter on April 9, 2026, and the disposition letters on July 30. Jaime Baker signed all three. William Mazanec took the admissions.

Those are men. I am not going to perform the cheap trick of calling them women so the thesis stays pretty. A proxy is not a sex change. For five years the women’s file moved through male offices as if the file were the weather and the man in the file were the climate. That is the hierarchy I mean when I say the cops took the women’s side. They did not become women. They became the instrument.

November 30, 2025, makes the distinction unavoidable. Henry W. Batteau — Brook, in the village mouth — came out of Floodwater first. The Commonwealth captioned him 2641CR0159, arraigned him April 7, 2026, on assault and battery, and on July 28 took his admission of facts sufficient and gave him the same six-month continuance without a finding and the same fifty-yard stay-away it gave his wife. Henry is not a woman. He is the household enforcer who put hands on me in the street and then stood in the same dock. If I erase him to keep the essay all-female I am doing the thing I accuse the club of doing: editing the roster to fit the sermon. He stays. He stays as the man who carried the violence while the letters, the petition, the thread, the kindness sign, the HooPla flame, and the eviction demand were written in women’s hands.

I used to eat because of women. That sentence will be read as bitterness. It is bookkeeping.

The public work that put my name on this village — the trolley gate, the pothole fountain, the benches, the metal that still sits in other people’s photographs — did not arrive because a brotherhood of contractors voted me onto the span. The deciding call, again and again, was the woman in the couple, or the women’s committee that treats the Bridge of Flowers as its horticultural parliament. I did not get the granite because men in a back room liked my jawline. I got it because women said yes. Then the same sex class that said yes ran the erasure and called the erasure justice.

The myth of the patriarchy is a cover story that this file cannot survive. If men ran this village the way the script insists, the Women’s Club would not be the gate on a public crossing, the petition would not have been a woman’s instrument, the Recorder feature would not have needed a female keeper of the flame to bless the bonfire, and the eviction letter to Brad Walker would not have opened with “I — along with many other women in the community.” Patriarchy-as-alibi is what you say when you want the enforcement to look like weather. Look at who signed.

My marriage is not an exhibit I enjoy putting on the table. I will put it on once, as inference, not as proof of a docket. The household I left taught me, in the ordinary American way, who holds the social veto. The woman does not need a title to end a man’s standing in a room. She needs the room to agree that her feeling is the record. I am not asking anyone to try my divorce. I am saying the village ran on the same physics, scaled up and letterheaded.

Silence is the whip.

No woman from the club stands up and says: the accusations are the opposite of the man who wrote the papers, poured the bronze, and asked the adults to stop performing a riot in front of children. Belonging is more expensive than the truth. That is the extortion. It does not require a statute. It requires a lunch table that will not have you if you break ranks. I have watched women who know better look at the floor. I have watched them share the kindness sign and the land acknowledgment and the “women are safe” laminate and then go quiet when the commissioner put a fake restraining order in a thread of twenty-two thousand views. The club does not need to vote a resolution titled We Hereby Ruin Him. It only needs no one to dissent.

I have written scores of pages they have all seen. They know the person in those pages is not the person in the petition. They maintain the silence anyway. That is not a misunderstanding. That is maintenance. A closed loop does not require every member to hate men as a class. It requires every member to prefer the loop. Misandry is the word that makes a dean laugh and change the subject. Unaccountable female-credentialed governance of a public asset, a petition that will not retract, a newsroom that will not correct, and a title-holder who will not drive to the meetings she holds — that is the thing a records request can touch. I will use both temperatures. The hot word is how it felt after six years. The cold word is what survives a motion to dismiss.

Walters. Hennessey. Batteau. Cavanaugh-Green. Kingsley. Szpila. Angus. Lofquist. Soroka. Berenson. Livingston. Byrne. Iveson. Stevens. Anderson. Sorenson. Rolon.

Not a vibe. A roster. The men who stamped it are in the next sentence, where they belong: downstream, except for the one who finally caught a docket of his own.

II. June 6, 2020 — they said children; I was talking to the adults

I was talking to the adults.

That is the whole night, if you strip the sermon off it. June 6, 2020, Iron Bridge, Bridge of Flowers, a pandemic Saturday, a road closed that nobody who makes a living on that crossing had been told was closed, a bullhorn working the river, a “vigil” that was not silent except in the sentence Catherine Hennessey later handed the police. I walked out because the span is a working village, not a set. I said the thing you say when people turn a public crossing into a stage without notice: you are hurting the shops, you are doing this in a plague, you are doing this in front of children, knock it off.

I did not say hurt the children. I said stop performing this at them.

They published the opposite.

Alouette Batteau’s camera went up. The cut that left the village was not the man asking adults to take the temperature down. It was the man as disruptor, the man as racial weather, the man you thank people for removing “from the scene.” Twenty-two thousand views is not a conversation. It is a verdict with a share button. Bianca Cavanaugh-Green’s petition followed the cut, not the uncut afternoon. The Recorder followed the petition’s weather. The club followed the Recorder. By the time the first police narrative hardened, my sentence about children had been inverted into a theory that I was the danger to them.

Watch the trick. It is the same trick every time. An adult objection to adult theater gets rewritten as a threat to the audience the adults brought. I was the one saying: do not run a pile-on on a bridge with kids in the frame. They were the ones who kept the kids in the frame and then pointed at me. When I said take you down I meant the video and the high horse. They told the town, and then the cops, that I meant a body. They chopped the explanation out of the next day’s clip. A clerk magistrate later sat through that seam. The public never did.

I know how this reads. The man who will not shut up about his own case is always one paragraph from sounding like the thing they called him. So I will stay on the inversion and not on my feelings. On June 6 I was an artist with work on that span telling other adults that an unannounced political closure in a pandemic, with a bullhorn, with children present, was a bad civic act. That is a protect-the-children sentence. They sold it as an endanger-the-children sentence. The difference is not subtle. It is the entire case.

Rhonda Anderson, years before she put a state title on a fake restraining order, posted a photograph of her own minor child in front of the Charlemont figure with a card of racial slurs, the strike-throughs still legible.

That is the sentence. I am not putting the child on this page. I am putting the adult’s choice on this page, because the same network that used a kid as scenery for a slur argument is the network that told Franklin County I was the man who could not be trusted around children. I told the adults to stop. She put the child in the picture. They called my objection the harm.

Call it psychopathy if you need a hot word. Call it projection if you want the cold one. I call it the dirty trick that made the next six years possible: perform fear for the children while creating the only actual danger on the span — a permanent public lie about the man who asked the adults to knock it off. Once that lie is the weather, every later lunch in a parking lot is stalking, every camera on a public sidewalk is harassment, every landlord letter writes itself, and the kindness sign that says WOMEN ARE SAFE can hang in the same summer as a comment thanking the circle for their bodies and their time.

I have no interest in a village that cannot tell the difference between a man warning adults and a man hunting children. I was the first. They printed the second. The children were never the subject. They were the shield. The subject was always the adults who would not be told no, and the club that discovered a story that would make telling them no look like a crime.

III. Named wreckers, documented acts

Sonseniora Walters did not need to be on the span. She needed a thread. In the same ecology where Anderson called me unhinged, Walters put years on the table: he will show clarity, then slip; I have quite a few years of seeing that behavior in him. That is not a witness statement about June 6. That is a character affidavit issued from the cheap seats. It taught the circle they already knew me. Once a town is told it already knows you, evidence becomes optional.

Catherine Hennessey — Kate, in the emails. The 2020 ecology starts with her body on the span, her first police sentence calling a bullhorn night a silent vigil, and the household camera that made the cut the record. Four years later she wrote the landlord.

September 6, 2024, 12:31 p.m., to Brad Walker at Below The Dam LLC: my adult child, Alouette (Lou); Lou meeting Kalliope Jones at the Mill; hateful racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric; I — along with many other women in the community; evict him; court cases, police reports, crazy videos; only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.September 7, Walker wrote back the sentence the village never absorbed: eviction over personal conflict, none of which to my knowledge has resulted in criminal or civil judgements against him, would notify every tenant that a workspace can be pulled on a grievance. He offered $100 and ninety minutes with a real mediator. September 9 she declined the temperature drop: discuss it with my lawyer; YouTube Hate Speech; verbally assaulting three young people; the LGBTQ+ community is not welcome in “his” space.

December 1, 2025, the morning after Floodwater, she swore the affidavit that had me slipping on sleet, shouting about a crime family, puffing up in an aisle, and wearing her fear like a coat. Same morning: 258E order 2541R00370, Greenfield District Court, Mazanec on the form, issued without notice, stay-away, hearing set December 15. That paper is not the criminal file. Keep them apart.

July 28, 2026, the criminal file landed. Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey, 2641CR0158. Jaime Baker, July 30 letter. Submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery. Continued without a finding, six months. Fifty yards. No contact. Malicious destruction of property under $1,200 continued generally under G.L. c. 276, § 87, on a not-guilty plea, same stay-away, restitution $429.99. Probation at Greenfield District Court. That is not a conviction. It is also not a rumor. It is the Commonwealth writing to the victim that she admitted facts sufficient and priced the phone.

The September 6 letter names Alouette and then Lou in one breath and hangs the eviction ask on identity plus Kalliope Jones. The 2020 camera is hers. Daughter in the obituary line, adult child in the landlord letter, name the club was told to use.

Bianca Cavanaugh-Green put ink on the village. The petition did not wait for a docket. It waited for a feeling and a cut of video and then asked the town to treat a living artist’s work as contraband. Hundreds of signatures is not a court. It is a crowd with a form. The Recorder weather followed the form. Once a petition exists, every later silence has a number to hide behind. She did not have to swing. She had to collect.

Kingsley. Szpila. Angus. Lofquist. Soroka. Last names on a private club that holds a public crossing. Chapter 180 nonprofit. Bridge of Flowers as horticultural parliament. The minutes, if they exist in the form a public asset requires, have not been produced in any volume that would let a citizen watch the vote that treated me as a stain instead of a maker. Deed, Chapter 180 status, Fire District entanglement, the empty minute book: those are still the lever. A women’s club may run a flower show however it likes. It may not launder a public span through closed Zooms, land-acknowledgment language, and a plaque that lectures the village while the man who put metal on the span is disappeared. Kay Berenson’s name belongs at the seam between committee and newsroom — former Recorder gravity, later the private call. The governance grievance does not need a motive lecture. It needs the fee estimate, the unanswered letters, the dates, and the chair where the minutes should be.

Berenson at the hinge. Mary Byrne in the COVID-conduct weather. Laura Iveson at the Art Garden, co-director, the voice that tells the Recorder it took two days to hang the lights. Stevens in the same civic copy stream. Madison Schofield, March 1, 2026: “It’s art and community,” tenth annual Winter HooPla, Jamie Malcolm-Brown’s photograph of Brook Batteau, Kate Hennessey, and Reed Sparrow at the bonfire. Kate as keeper of the flame since inception, willing to bring the wood. That feature ran after November 30 and before July 28. I am not charging Schofield with a cover-up. I am charging the weather system with a split screen: December affidavit in a frog mask; March saint at a mason-jar bonfire. A paper that will lecture the county about fake news and then print the flame-keeper without the docket is not neutral. It is a choir with a deadline.

Rhonda K. Anderson, Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, Mass.gov, Governor-chosen seat on the seal-and-flag commission, belongs on this roster as the title that went onto the thread. The full file is the next chapter.

Henry W. Batteau. Brook in the village. Husband in the obituary. First body out the brewery door on November 30, by my account and by the way the Commonwealth captioned the night. Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau, 2641CR0159. Arraigned April 7, 2026, assault and battery. Victim letter April 9: personal recognizance, stay away, no contact, pre-trial May 20. July 28, same judge, same courthouse: facts sufficient on assault and battery, continuance without a finding six months, fifty yards, no contact. He is not a woman. He is the man who took the same admission his wife took. Erase him and the essay becomes a sermon. Keep him and the household is what it is: letters in her hand, hands in his, one stay-away written twice.

The ranks did not break on July 29. No club statement. No Recorder correction box. No commissioner update. The flame-keeper still had the wood. The petition still had the signatures. The kindness sign still said women are safe. A docket is only a fact if someone is willing to read it out loud in the same room where they used to read the petition. They were not willing. That is the act. The names above are the actors.

IV. The commissioner who would not drive

Rhonda K. Anderson is the Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs. That is not a vibe. That is Mass.gov, Commission on Indian Affairs, M.G.L. c. 6A, § 8A, listed with the other regional seats under the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities. John “Jim” Peters, Jr., executive director. Anderson: Western Massachusetts. She is also, on the public stack, a member chosen by the Governor to the Massachusetts Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission; a governing-council name at the Mass Cultural Council; NEFA advisory; Ohketeau founder and former co-director; 2021 Commonwealth Heroine; 2022 Berkshire NAACP Freedom Fund. WBUR, 2023: she wanted the Route 2 corridor’s stereotypical figures gone. On paper she is the institutional voice for Indigenous presence in this half of the state. Mention the name in certain rooms around here and the eyes roll. Rhonda knows best.

I am not writing a brief against nations, commissions, or every person who has ever said a land acknowledgment. I am writing the file of one title-holder who used the title in a thread about me, then went quiet when the title might have cost her something.

The first real contact soured early and stayed sour. Around 2009–2010 a remark to her husband got misread, flipped, and locked me in the villain slot. A year or two later I opened the metal shop at 44 State Street and offered a clean collaboration. She made Native silver. I worked in metal. We could have split rent. She went mousy, then declined — silver too expensive, the accountant story. After that she never set foot in the shop again. Nine years of silence. The mutual friend still came. She did not.

June 2020, under the edited bridge video — twenty-two thousand views — the same woman, now wearing the state title, told the internet I was a little unhinged, a conspiracy-theorist type, that I thought BLM was trash, that I was disrespectful and dangerous in a pandemic, and thank you to everyone generous with their bodies and time for trying to remove me from the scene. She was not on the span. She thanked the circle anyway.

Then the comment she could not leave alone.

September 12, 9:34 a.m.: Jasper Forest Heard, but I wasn’t actually even there, and have known the guy for a while, and know he isn’t ready to listen. There are restraining orders against him for holding this grudge and harassing women he feels are involved, including me.

September 12, 9:46 a.m. — twelve minutes: she adds from first-hand 1:1 experience. She adds Tagging me in, isn’t making me feel very safe. The orders stay present tense. There are restraining orders.

September 13, 9:26 a.m.: There are restraining orders becomes There were efforts towards restraining orders. The safety line stays. Facebook prints the confession under the bubbles: Edits to comments are visible to everyone who can see this comment.

That is the dirty trick in three frames. A docket that does not exist. Then borrowed intimacy — first-hand, one-to-one — as if proximity were a filing. Then the vulnerability shield: tagging her does not feel safe. Then the walk-back that still leaves “efforts” hanging in the air for anyone who did not watch the edit history. Harassment-prevention orders are not restraining orders. Failed petitions are not a restraining-order file “against him, including me.” Judges did not buy those petitions. She treated the petitions as findings and hung them on a commissioner-shaped name in a thread built to end a man. The title did that work. The title does not get to shrug.

July 15, 2020 — same summer, same mouth — she posted the West County Kindness Project: In this house… ALL ARE WELCOME / BLACK LIVES MATTER / WE PRACTICE KINDNESS / WOMEN ARE SAFE / WATER IS LIFE. Signs at $10.50. I am not going to pretend no woman in Franklin County was ever unsafe. I am going to put the sign next to the 9:34 a.m. bubble and leave them there. You cannot sell WOMEN ARE SAFE in mason-jar fonts and, in the same season, publish a legal history that never existed so a man becomes harder to stand beside. That is not kindness. That is branding.

The statue file is the civic twin of the thread. The Big Fucking Indian — the Charlemont fiberglass figure the corridor used as a landmark and a fight — is the object WBUR already quoted her wanting off Route 2. The campaign to move it, the Oklahoma relocation story, the contrast with Hail to the Sunrise still standing in Charlemont as a different kind of bronze: that is public record and village memory. A commissioner may argue a figure is a caricature. A commissioner does not get to invent court paper about a neighbor and then lecture the county about harmful narratives.

She posted a photograph of her own minor child in front of that figure with a card of racial slurs, the strike-throughs still legible.

No name. No face. The adult posted the picture. The same network that used a child as scenery is the network that told this county I was the danger to children because I told adults to stop performing a pile-on on a bridge. I am done putting minors on the page to win a paragraph. I am not done naming the adult who thought the paragraph needed a child.

The standard does not travel inward. September 19, 2017, her wall: IF ANYBODY DRESSES AS A NATIVE AMERICAN FOR HALLOWEEN I’M GOING TO MACE YOU AND GIVE YOU THE FULL EXPERIENCE #NoDAPL. That is threat language from a person who later sat in a state seat. I am not charging an assault that did not happen. I am charging a mouth that preaches harm-reduction at mascots and jokes about chemical spray at costumes. May 9, 2015, she memorialized Etok Charles Edwardsen Jr. with his 1970 Washington line: The United States got gypped when it bought Alaska. “Gypped” is an anti-Romani slur. She did not coin it in a comment war. She put a dead cousin’s speech on her wall and left the word there. Context is a memorial. The word is still the word. A commissioner who can hear a sports mascot from three counties away can hear that.

She will not drive.

The title covers western Massachusetts. The meetings are posted. The complaint from the seat, in the rooms where people still talk, is the mileage — Colrain to Boston, Colrain to the next hearing, the five acres, the dead cell, the Zoom instead of the table. Do not take the job if the job is the drive. A commissioner who will not appear in the rooms she is paid in standing to represent is not a bridge. She is a letterhead. I sent the Pocumtuck State of Mind proposal into that silence: a mapped park idea, a repair language, salmon and passage and the Green River land she actually lives on, not a press-release land acknowledgment recycled from a coastal nation. Radio silence. The woman who will post about mascots, kindness signs, and my imaginary restraining orders will not answer a landscape proposal that takes her title at its word. That is the civic crime in this chapter. Not her biography. The refusal to use the office for anything except the story the office already likes.

I offered the shop. She declined. I offered the park. She declined by not existing. In between she offered the county a docket I never had and a feeling of unsafety she typed onto a comment she then edited when the present tense got too expensive. The patients painted the walls blue. Some of them got a seal out of it. The seal does not make the 9:46 a.m. bubble true. It only makes it louder.

V. Alice’s playground, Wu optics, Springfield concrete

Alice G. (Moloney) Hennessey died April 1, 2017, at eighty-four. The obituaries do not hedge the family line. Boston Herald, April 5, 2017: longtime aide to Mayor Thomas M. Menino, former Boston City Council staff director, South End and Hull, formerly West Roxbury. Survived by William F., sixty-one years married; among the children, Katie of Shelburne Falls. Hull Times and the funeral notice fill the rest of the household: Katie Hennessey and her husband, Brook Batteau, of Shelburne Falls; granddaughter Alouette Batteau of Shelburne Falls. Flynn called her a social-justice worker on homeless policy. Walsh called her a mentor in City Hall and at the library. Rosie’s Place. Sunset Point. West Roxbury Friends. That is the public Alice.

Boston Parks, Women’s History Month 2026, still has her on the city site under Mayor Michelle Wu’s government header: Alice Hennessey Playground at Millennium Park, West Roxbury, the Gardner Street landfill turned greenspace, the Menino Project she directed. The page gives her the sentence I cannot improve:

“Women initiate ideas and carry out projects that involve the entire community and give them a pride of ownership.”

Read that sentence in Boston and it is a civic valentine. Read it in Shelburne Falls against this file and it is an accidental confession. Women initiated. Women carried out. Pride of ownership. The playground carries her name. The daughter lives in the village where a women’s club treats a public bridge like a parlor, where a landlord letter spoke for “many other women,” where a March bonfire needed a female keeper of the flame, where a state commissioner put a title on a comment and did not drive to the consequence. I am not saying Alice filed the petition. I am saying the city’s own commemorative copy already named the operating system.

I do not have a memo in which Alice taught Catherine how to write a police narrative or an eviction ask. I have a daughter who grew up in the weather of Menino’s City Hall — patronage, neighborhood boards, who gets the ribbon, who gets the landfill turned into a park — and I have a village six years deep in female-credentialed enforcement dressed as care. Boston machine politics is a reasonable prior. “She learned her tricks at the mayor’s elbow” is an inference I will own as inference. “Alice was a bully because the daughter is a bully” is gossip, and it stays out. The working rule is simpler: when you deal with the top of that city you assume the incentives are corrupt until the paper says otherwise. That is not a finding about a dead woman. That is a working rule about a machine.

Michelle Wu’s name on the Parks page is branding, not a Franklin County command. The 2026 Women’s History copy, the playground still, the civic habit of putting a living mayor’s office over a dead aide’s park — that is how managerial Boston talks to itself. Wu did not dispatch Hennessey to the Iron Bridge. What Wu’s page does is keep Alice inside a story about women, parks, ownership, and pride, in the same season the Commonwealth was sending me disposition letters about Alice’s daughter. Optics. Not a conspiracy whiteboard. Do not collapse the distance. Do not pretend the distance is infinite either. The same class of female-credentialed managerial speech that names a playground for the mother printed a bonfire saint for the daughter and called both community.

Now the concrete.

The new Springfield pile — Regional Justice Center, Ireland Courthouse successor, the two-billion-dollar thing — is not my docket. It is the state’s picture of how the Blue Hood class builds when the cameras are on Boston and the steel is in Hampden County. Losing bidders Jeb Balise and Dinesh Patel sued. They pointed at Liberty Junction, at John Barros, at CoJo Partners, at Conan Harris. Harris is married to Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley. Pressley is not the Attorney General. Andrea Joy Campbell is the Attorney General. Maura Healey is the Governor. Get the names right or the paragraph is a gift to the people who want you to sound like you do not read.

Hampden Superior Court Judge David M. Hodge, late August 2026, twenty-nine pages: no legal or logical support for the plaintiffs’ conflict theory under G.L. c. 268A, § 7. Injunction denied. DCAMM and Liberty Junction may keep negotiating. Hodge wrote that the plaintiffs offered no evidence Barros acted so that a reasonable person would think someone could improperly influence him in the MCCA interim seat. The Globe noted the board overlap the plaintiffs liked: a Healey budget secretary on the convention board that voted Barros in, the same fiscal neighborhood as DCAMM. Hodge was not impressed. Campbell’s office then moved to dismiss DCAMM out with prejudice. Healey and Campbell’s public defense, echoed in Hodge’s memo, is taxpayer math: hundreds of millions saved over the life, Liberty Junction cheaper by the month than the next finalist. The losing bidders call that a sermon. The judge called their theory convoluted.

I am not going to invent a conviction Hodge refused to preview. I am going to say what the picture is. A two-billion-dollar justice palace, political last names in the winning stack, an attorney general defending the procurement, a governor’s budget shop in the background of the convention board, a judge slamming the door on the pause. Whether that is genius procurement or the oldest Boston sport dressed as process is a question the courthouse lawsuit may still try to keep alive on appeal. For this essay it is architecture. The same managerial class that talks equity and community safety pours the concrete and hires the cousins. Shelburne Falls is the cottage version: no two billion, just a span, a club, a petition, a title, a letter to a landlord. The grammar is identical. Women initiate. Women carry out. Pride of ownership. Men sign the injunction denials and the victim-advocate letters.

Look at the roll, not the myth. Secretary William F. Galvin’s enrollment numbers, August 2026: more than 5.1 million registered voters. Democrats about twenty-four percent. Republicans under eight percent, lowest share since at least 1948. Unenrolled just over sixty-seven percent — a new high. Both parties shed tens of thousands in eighteen months; the roll itself grew. This is not a two-party state in the way civics class sells it. It is an unenrolled majority administered by a one-party managerial stack. The stack is heavily female at the credential nodes that touch this file — clubs, commissions, equity language, victim-and-safety speech, Parks copy, Cultural Council seats — and male at the stamp-and-steel nodes: Hodge, Sullivan, Mazanec, Gilmore. Patriarchy is the alibi you recite while the unenrolled drive past a courthouse deal they did not bid and a bridge they do not sit on the committee for.

Marissa Leigh Elkins walked into my hearing as Hennessey’s lawyer. I am not going to smear a lawyer for taking a file. That is what lawyers do. The public bio is enough to place her on the map: Northampton city councilor at-large; partner, Sharp, Heyman, Dolven & Elkins; Super Lawyers every year from 2014 through 2026; Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly Lawyer of the Year, 2015, for appellate work in Commonwealth v. Dorazio; CPCS staff attorney in the Northampton Superior office before the private firms. Her council page talks climate plans, Department of Community Care, policing-review recommendations, public health and public safety in the same breath. That is the western-Mass legal-aid-and-equity mesh in one person: defense lawyer in the morning, municipal progressive in the evening. She tried two-party consent on a public sidewalk and ran out of magazine. That is advocacy. It is also the class. The same credential cloud that will tell a city it needs a Department of Community Care will tell a judge that a man with a camera is the threat. I beat the argument in the room I was standing in. I did not beat the weather system that hired her.

Alice named the method without meaning to. Wu kept the name on the park. Healey and Campbell kept the concrete moving. Galvin’s tables say most of us are not even in the party that staffs the method. Elkins is what the method looks like when it puts on a suit and says objection. None of that is Shelburne Falls by itself. All of it is the building the village case was always going to run into once it left the span.

VI. The Walker letters, Lou, the cartoon

Brad Walker had been in the building five minutes, in village time, when the mail arrived.

September 6, 2024, 12:31 p.m. Kate to Walker at Below The Dam LLC.

Hi Mr Walker. This is Kate. We met the other day when John Sendelbach verbally accosted and harassed my adult child, Alouette (Lou) in the space next to Raven Books. Four years of harassment, she wrote. The latest: Lou meeting bandmates — Kalliope Jones — promo for The Drake, books and treats at Raven, pictures in the Mill, deeply engrossed, then me, then two videos, approaching, berating, following, narrating hateful racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.Community-violation takedowns, but up long enough. I had insisted Lou violated his workspace. Screen recordings available, a waste of time. Then the ask, unadorned: I’m writing now to ask that you evict Mr Sendelbach. Then the choir sentence: I — along with many other women in the community — am not able to come to any events at The Mill. Can’t shop Raven. Can’t do Open Studios. Can’t do the concerts. Building, lot, once the Conway Street sidewalk. Eviction is complicated, she granted. He is giving the Mill a bad name. Court cases, police reports, crazy videos. He’s a menace to the community and it’s really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.

That is not a noise complaint. That is an eviction theory with an identity spine and a safety chorus and a future body on the floor.

September 7, 7:48 p.m. Walker to Kate.

Legacy tenant. Pivot to community, not evictions. Then the sentence the village never put on a flyer: Evicting John due to personal conflict — none of which to my knowledge has resulted in criminal or civil judgements against him — 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. Eviction would not solve Shelburne Falls. Offer: one hundred dollars toward a bona-fide third-party counselor, ninety minutes, John and Kate and/or Lou, Resolution MA or Amherst mediators, you pick, I will introduce them to John.

September 9, 10:18 a.m. Kate again.

Generous offer. I will discuss it with my lawyer. The family is not the only target. Many in the community do not feel safe at Mill events. Videos removed from YouTube for Hate Speech. Him in the building verbally assaulting three young people who were minding their own business. Claiming the building. Narration making clear the LGBTQ+ community is not welcome in “his” space. Difficult position, she granted. Having him in the building is not good for the other tenants or the community as a whole.

She did not take the ninety minutes. She took the lawyer. Fourteen months later the phone was in the river and the District Attorney was typing 2641CR0158.

The name in the first sentence is the argument. Adult child, Alouette (Lou). Not a private kitchen word. A word she sent to a landlord to make an eviction feel like shelter. Lou is the name she demanded the building use. Alouette is the name in Alice’s obituary. The letter puts both on one line so the recipient cannot hide behind the wrong one. Identity is not a subplot. Identity is the prime mover she chose when she asked a man with keys to throw another man out.

“Adult child” is also recovery-culture diction — the ACA phrase for a person raised in an alcoholic house — and I will not pretend I did not hear that overtone. I do not have her meeting card. I have her diction.

Kalliope Jones sells anti-solipsistic sophistication. The copy is charming if you have never stood on the sidewalk after the set. Solipsism is the room that will not let the world in. Anti-solipsism would mean a household capable of being surprised by a video, a timestamp, a witness named Zachary Livingston, a restitution figure typed by Jaime Baker. November 30, 2025, is what the slogan looks like when the room stays closed: a brewery door, a charge, a phone in the Deerfield, a December 1 affidavit in which I slip on leaves, a March bonfire in the Recorder with the keeper of the flame still holding the wood, a July 28 admission of facts sufficient on assault and battery. That is not sophistication. That is a closed loop with a press kit.

2015 stays a template and nothing else. A teenage comment inflated into a national shaming object; a household that learned the internet will finish a sentence you start; the same grammar later run at a grown man on a bridge. I am not putting a child on this page to win 2015. I am saying the method was already in the house before I ever said a word to them.

The cartoon is what happens when you watch the stack get taller and refuse to kneel.

First-wave feminism, the version I will still sign, is the vote, the contract, the shop key, the right not to be owned. What arrived on Walker’s desk is a later floor: identity as an eviction code, “many other women” as a standing army, LGBTQ+ safety as a reason a landlord must choose a side before a judge has. The letter does not say I lost a case. Walker’s reply says I had not. The letter says the videos felt like hate and the building felt like mine and therefore the lease should die. That is a belief system. It is the same system that can hate men as a class in the afternoon and demand the language of men for an adult child in the evening and call both justice. I cannot get my head all the way around it because it comes from two directions at once. They do not want men on the committee. They do not want men asked about the laminate over the fountain. They want the landlord to treat a man as a contaminant in a space they have decided is theirs. Then some of the same stack wants to be addressed as the thing they will not let in the room. It is not a theory of every woman. It is a cartoon of a particular church. Churches look insane from the sidewalk. That is not a diagnosis. That is a description of the letter.

She handed me the protocol. Defamation, in the textbook sense, likes a publication to a third party with a damaging fact presented as fact. Walker was the third party. Menace. Someone gets hurt. Hate speech. Not welcome. No judgment, he wrote back. She sent it anyway. I did not need to invent a civil theory. She mailed it to the man with the keys and asked him to finish the six-year job the petition had started. He declined to evict on a grievance. The village declined to notice that he had declined. The letters sat in a police file until I pried them loose. Then they became what they always were: the written version of the club. Women initiate. Women carry out. Pride of ownership. Evict him. Someone will get hurt. Someone did. The hurt, when it came, had a docket and a restitution line, and it was not the hurt she promised Walker. It was the phone, and my head, and the admission she later gave Mazanec when the season for letters ran out.

VII. Clancy as rhyme, not twin

I have been watching Plymouth the way you watch a fire on the other bank: close enough to feel the heat, far enough that only a fool would call it the same house.

Press time, September 1, 2026. Lindsay Clancy, Duxbury, three children dead in January 2023, a suicide attempt out the window, a defense of postpartum psychosis, a five-week trial, a jury of nine women and three men. Fourth day of deliberations. A note to Judge William F. Sullivan: after many hours, unable to reach a unanimous decision. He sent them back. First-degree, second-degree, manslaughter, not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility, not guilty. No verdict as I type. Kevin Reddington saying he would try it again if they hang.

Duxbury is not Shelburne Falls. Her facts are not my facts. She admitted the killings. I admitted a camera and a mouth. Anyone who collapses those two sentences is doing the thing I am accusing other people of doing: running a feeling until it eats the file.

What rhymes is the weather around the woman at the center.

I watched clips of women on the sidewalk insisting the hormones write a blank check. I watched other women, one of them in a short video that made the rounds, saying equal rights means equal wrongs and a body count is not a vibe. I watched the thirty-minute compilations stitch “she is allowed to vote” over the same three deaths until the suffrage argument became a blunt instrument. That weather is not evidence that Clancy is innocent or guilty. It is evidence that a large part of the culture will organize its morality around the sex of the defendant before it organizes around the record. Identification first. Facts if there is time.

That is the rhyme. In Duxbury the identification runs toward the woman in the dock. In Shelburne Falls it ran toward the women with the petition, the thread, the landlord letter, the kindness sign. Same physics, opposite dockets. A belief system that treats a woman’s interior as the authentic document and a man’s paper as harassment. When the interior is postpartum psychosis the fight is over criminal responsibility. When the interior is I feel unsafe the fight is over whether a parking spot is a hunt. I am not saying those interiors are fake. I am saying a system that cannot let a video in the room is not a system. It is a church.

If the Clancy jury hangs, the church will call it proof the law cannot hold a mother. If they convict, the church will call it misogyny. If they acquit on lack of responsibility, the church will call it science. The file will be whatever the identification needs. I know that move. I lived in it for six years. The difference is I still have Baker’s letters and Walker’s refusal and Anderson’s three timestamps. Clancy’s jury has the rest of today. I am not waiting on them to finish my sentence. I am using their weather the way a surveyor uses a distant ridge: to show the grade.

VIII. Blue Hoods and the horticultural Invisible Empire

The script says the hoods were white and male and finished. The clip file says the method liked this valley before any of us were born.

North Adams Transcript, September 8, 1924: bombs and fiery crosses above Shelburne Falls, troopers from the local barracks finding embers in the rain, a small cross fixed to a raft floated down the Deerfield into the village. October 17, 1924: a sympathizer telling the paper the Klan was stronger in western Franklin than the polite rooms admitted, an influential membership in Shelburne Falls, a threat to take the next town election. November 28, 1924: eight crosses in western Franklin — Shelburne Falls, Colrain, Charlemont, Griswoldville — five of them on this village’s hills, advertised as prelude to a membership drive. The Berkshire Eagle’s later history: 1925 elections in Buckland and Shelburne Falls dominated by Klan talk, Klan-friendly candidates slipping through on thin margins. Charlemont fairgrounds two years after that. Photographers treated roughly. Outsiders banned. The 1930s leftover gatherings around Buckland and Shelburne Falls when the national dues-roll had already collapsed.

I am not writing “the Women’s Club is the Klan.” That sentence is a gift to anyone who wants this essay to die in a letter to the editor. I am writing function.

The old method was boundary policing with respectability on top: who may stand in the road, who may keep a shop, who may hold a town seat, who gets the night spectacle and who gets the silence after. Protestant womanhood as the jewel to be protected. Catholics, Jews, Black families, the wrong kind of white — the list moved. The tool did not. Closed meetings. Electoral capture on small margins. A newspaper that could print the crosses and still have to live with the men who lit them. A river used as a stage.

The new method wears a blue hood. Equity language. Land acknowledgment. Community safety. Kindness signs. A Chapter 180 corporation that holds a public crossing the way a parlor holds a tea service. Closed Zooms. A petition instead of a torch. A landlord letter instead of a white cap. A commissioner comment instead of a posted warning. Same valley. Same span. Same river that took a toy cross in 1924 and a phone in 2025.

The Shelburne Falls Area Women’s Club is a private body with a public asset problem. Chapter 180 is the statute that lets a nonprofit exist. It is not a license to govern a bridge as a membership perk and then refuse the minute book when the membership uses the bridge to erase a maker. Deed, delegation, Fire District entanglement, Board of Fire Commissioners vacuum: those are the records requests that still have teeth. I do not need “these women hate men” to file that ask. I need the fee estimate, the unanswered letters, the dates, the Recorder piece, the empty chair where the minutes should be. Unresponsive governance of a public asset is a claim that survives a motion to laugh. Misandry is the claim that gets you dismissed by people who have already dismissed you.

Patriarchy is the alibi. Say the word and the room looks at fathers, select boards, the male cop, the male judge, the male DA letterhead, and calls the case closed. Look at who moved the story. The club. The petition. The thread. The kindness sign. The eviction ask. The flame-keeper. The title on Indian Affairs. The Parks sentence Alice left on a playground: women initiate, women carry out, pride of ownership. The men stamped what they were handed until one of them finally put hands on me and Sullivan’s shop captioned him. That is not a residual patriarchy. That is a managerial matriarchy with a progressive veil and a male clerk.

Patients took over the asylum and painted the walls blue. The Invisible Empire’s horticultural successors learned you do not need a burning cross if you have a planting committee and a moral vocabulary the newspaper already speaks. You need a span, a season, a feeling, and no one willing to break ranks. The 1924 paper called the crosses an advertisement. The 2020 video was an advertisement. The 2024 letter to Walker was an advertisement. The product is the same: this person does not belong on this ground.

I will take the Fire District lever over the metaphor if I can only keep one. Metaphors do not open minute books. Statutes do. The continuity I am claiming is not costume. It is who gets to decide that a man is finished, and how quietly the village agrees to be finished with him. The hood changed color. The river did not.

IX. The criminal ledger: November 30 → April 7 → July 28

The night first, then the letterhead. I am not going to make a movie out of a beating. I am going to put the sequence where the District Attorney later put the caption.

November 30, 2025. Afternoon: her Prius onto the lot I rent, the smile, the finger, the second finger, fuck you, gone. Evening: Floodwater. I film a car that looks like hers, pan the glass, see the household in the front row. A man I do not know comes out of the building already loud. Zachary Livingston tries to take the temperature down. Henry W. Batteau — Brook — comes through the door and puts me in the street. Phone out of the hand. Shoe off. Punches from behind. I yell for help. People watch. Hennessey is in it. Livingston, by my account, picks up the shoe. She picks up the phone that is still lit, walks the long way around the building, and throws it in the Deerfield. I stay back far enough that the next sentence cannot be he chased her. I watch the arc. Then she comes back and works the ankles and the head a second time. That is the night. If Livingston signs it, the shoe and the shout become paper. Until then the Commonwealth has already decided the night was enough to caption.

December 1, morning after. Two papers. Keep them apart.

258E docket 2541R00370. Catherine Hennessey, plaintiff. John Sendelbach, defendant. Greenfield District Court. Issued without advance notice: substantial likelihood of immediate danger of harassment. Judge name on the form: Mazanec. Stay-away, no contact. Expiration December 15, 2025, 4 p.m. Hearing that morning at nine. The affidavit under it is the sleet, the slip, the crime family, the frog mask, the aisle that puffed itself up. Separate from the criminal file that will later carry 2641CR0158 and 2641CR0159. Two docks. One household. One courthouse. The 258E is the shield she filed before the assault case had a number. December 15 is the extension fight. I will not invent Mazanec’s December words. The form is enough: the same judge who stamped the emergency paper in December took the admissions in July.

April 9, 2026. The Commonwealth writes to me as if I existed.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. District Attorney. Northwestern District. David E. Sullivan. 56 Bank Row, Greenfield. Jaime Baker, Victim/Witness Advocate.

RE: Commonwealth vs. Henry W. Batteau, Docket # 2641CR0159

Dear John,

As a result of the events of November 30, 2025, the above-named defendant was arraigned on April 7, 2026, in Greenfield District Court on the charge(s) of Assault and Battery. At the arraignment the Court ordered that the defendant be released on personal recognizance with the condition to stay away and have no contact with you. The case has been scheduled for a pre-trial conference on May 20, 2026. Court begins at 9:00 a.m. … You are not required to do so unless you receive a summons.

Victim-impact form enclosed. Defense counsel may call; I owe them nothing. I am the named victim on a man’s assault docket. The village that spent five years telling itself I was the menace now has a letter from Sullivan’s shop that runs the other direction. They did not read it at the bonfire.

July 28, 2026, before William Mazanec. July 30, Baker writes it down twice.

RE: Commonwealth vs. CATHERINE HENNESSEY, Docket # 2641CR0158

On July 28, 2026, before Judge William Mazanec in Greenfield District Court, the above-named defendant submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on the charge(s) of Assault and Battery. The charge was continued without a finding for the period of 6 months with the order that the defendant complies with the following conditions: stay 50 yards away and have no contact with John Sendelbach.

On July 28, 2026, before Judge William Mazanec in Greenfield District Court, the charge of Malicious Destruction of Property Under $1200 was continued generally under Chapter 276, section 87, which is a not guilty plea, for a period of 6 months with the conditions to stay 50 yards away and have no contact with John Sendelbach and to pay restitution in the amount of $429.99.

Monitored by Greenfield District Court Probation.

RE: Commonwealth vs. HENRY W. BATTEAU, Docket # 2641CR0159

Same judge. Same day. Facts sufficient on assault and battery. Continued without a finding, six months. Fifty yards. No contact. Probation. No destruction count in his letter.

A continuance without a finding is not a jury saying guilty. It is not an acquittal. It is not Cedar Junction. It is the off-ramp the Commonwealth uses when it has the facts and would rather mark the file than try it: the defendant admits the facts are enough to convict, the judge holds the finding in his pocket, the clock runs, the stay-away is real, probation is real. Finish the six months clean and the finding may never enter. Trip and it can come back. Hennessey’s destruction count is even thinner on paper — continued generally under G.L. c. 276, § 87, not-guilty plea still on the docket — and still carries the number that matters to me. $429.99. That is the phone in the river, priced by a victim-advocate on DA letterhead. Not a metaphor. A line item.

March 1, 2026, between the night and the admission, the Greenfield Recorder printed the other movie. Madison Schofield. Jamie Malcolm-Brown’s photograph: Brook Batteau, Kate Hennessey, and Reed Sparrow at the tenth annual Winter HooPla bonfire. Kate, keeper of the flame since inception, willing to bring the wood. “It’s art and community.” I am not accusing Schofield of burying 2641CR0158. The docket did not exist yet. I am accusing the weather of a split screen that never resolved. December frog-mask fear. February mason jars. July facts sufficient. The paper ran the flame. It did not run the stay-away.

The phone is in the river. The archive is not.

Stone still in the ground — gate, fountain, bench, the work they could not petition out of the dirt. Text still on the surface — Walker’s three emails, Anderson’s three timestamps, Baker’s three letters, Schofield’s bonfire, Alice’s playground sentence. Heartbeat still in the chest: the LIFEPAK strip when I have it, the bathroom light that has not gone off in five years because I do not trust the dark. Livingston is the name in the room who was not in the choir. If he signs, the shoe is paper. If he does not, the DA already signed the night.

They tried to engineer a ghost with a petition and a thread and a letter to a landlord. On July 28 the ghost’s alleged predators stood in front of Mazanec and gave him facts sufficient. The man they tried to erase collected the mail at P.O. Box 461 and kept talking. The receipts are not in the Deerfield. The receipts have a victim-advocate’s signature and a restitution line that still has not bought the village an apology.

X.

If a culture can watch a docket and still prefer the feeling; if “many other women” can outrun a landlord’s sentence that there were no judgments; if a kindness sign can hang in the same summer as a fake restraining order; if a flame-keeper can make the paper before the stay-away does — then the loudest people on the sidewalk will say repeal the Nineteenth. I am not introducing that bill. I am naming the dare they already took. Equal rights includes equal wrongs. A sex class is not a sacrament. If that sentence is all you reprint, you came for the dare and not the letters.

They tried to engineer a ghost.

The petition was the sheet. The thread was the sheet. The landlord letter was the sheet. The December affidavit was the sheet. The bonfire photograph was the sheet. For six years the village agreed to see the sheet and not the man.

On July 28, 2026, Catherine Hennessey and Henry W. Batteau stood in front of William Mazanec and submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery. Continuance without a finding. Six months. Fifty yards. No contact. Her destruction count continued generally under G.L. c. 276, § 87, $429.99 to the man whose phone they priced after they threw it in the river. Jaime Baker signed the letters. David E. Sullivan’s office put them in the mail. P.O. Box 461.

The cultural script still says patriarchy. The file says Blue Hoods: a managerial class with female-credentialed enforcement and male stamps, a Chapter 180 parlor on a public span, a 1924 method with the hood painted over. The men carried water until one of them carried fists. The patients painted the walls blue.

The ghost they wanted is still standing. The receipts are not in the Deerfield. The receipts are on District Attorney letterhead.

— John F. Sendelbach
Sculptor
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts
2026

The work is still in the ground. The body is still standing. The record is intact. Stone, text, heartbeat. None of them went in the river.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

INCIDENT SUMMARY

John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls · 2020–2026

This document describes a sequence of incidents involving John F. Sendelbach and members of the Hennessey/Batteau family, along with related civic, landlord, media, and legal proceedings from 2020 through 2026. The summary below focuses on the reported events and documentary record rather than the author's psychological or political interpretation.

June 6, 2020 — Iron Bridge / Bridge of Flowers

On June 6, 2020, Sendelbach describes an encounter at the Iron Bridge/Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls. He states that he was speaking to adults participating in a vigil and objected to children being used in the activity. He maintains that he did not address or threaten children.

An edited video of the encounter subsequently circulated. Mary Byrne covered the incident in the Greenfield Recorderon June 12. Bianca Cavanaugh-Green created a Change.org petition based on the edited video, and Kate Stevenspublished a “My Turn” column on June 20.

The document also identifies Sonseniora Walters as part of the surrounding public atmosphere. Catherine Hennesseywas already connected to the local events described by Sendelbach. The later record involving Hennessey therefore begins, in his chronology, several years before the 2025 criminal case.

September 2024 — Letter to Brad Walker

On September 6, 2024, Kate Hennessey wrote to Brad Walker concerning an encounter involving her adult child, Alouette “Lou” Batteau, near Raven Books. Kate said Lou had been meeting with bandmate Kalliope Jones concerning promotion for an upcoming performance at The Drake in Amherst.

Kate alleged that Sendelbach verbally accosted and harassed Lou, followed them, and posted videos of the encounter. She characterized statements in the videos as racist, sexist, transphobic, and anti-LGBTQ and asked Walker to evict Sendelbach.

Walker responded September 7 that he knew of no criminal or civil judgments against Sendelbach. Kate wrote again September 9, expanding the allegations and again seeking action.

May 21, 2025 — Keystone Market

On May 21, 2025, Sendelbach describes an encounter at Keystone Market in Shelburne Falls. He says a woman positioned herself close behind him, later stated that she felt “unsafe,” and was escorted outside by the store owner.

Sendelbach states that exterior surveillance video showed the woman smiling, making an obscene gesture toward him from her vehicle, and laughing while leaving. He subsequently presented the video to Judge William F. Mazanec III.

November 22, 2025 — Bridge Street

On November 22, Sendelbach was documenting a truck parked for several days in a posted two-hour zone near Floodwater Brewing. He encountered the same woman wearing a large paper-mâché frog mask.

According to the document, her December 1 affidavit stated that she wore the mask because she believed Sendelbach might appear and she did not want him to recognize her. Sendelbach says she nevertheless stood approximately six feet away for several minutes and told him, “John, I hope you get the help you need.”

November 30, 2025 — Floodwater Brewing

The most consequential incident occurred November 30, 2025, at approximately 5:45 p.m. outside Floodwater Brewing, 40 State Street, Buckland.

Sendelbach states that he was standing on the public sidewalk recording and did not enter the brewery. According to his account and the cited witness material, Henry W. Batteau exited the brewery, shoved him with both hands, knocked him backward onto the pavement, and struck him from behind. Sendelbach's phone fell during the incident while it was still recording.

He states that Catherine Hennessey then exited and struck him repeatedly in the head and face. He says another person held his arms from behind while Hennessey continued striking him. He called for help and eventually broke free.

Zachary Livingston, identified as the owner of Floodwater Brewing and a witness, retrieved Sendelbach's shoe and later provided a written statement to police. Livingston reported that Batteau shoved Sendelbach and referred to a dispute involving Sendelbach and Batteau's family.

Sendelbach states that Hennessey then took his still-recording phone from the roadway, carried it approximately seventy-five feet to the Deerfield River, and threw it into the water. The phone and recording were destroyed. He further states that Hennessey subsequently followed him and struck and kicked him again.

December 15, 2025 — District Court

On December 15, Sendelbach appeared before Judge William Mazanec in Greenfield District Court concerning harassment-prevention matter 2541R00370. He states that Mazanec reviewed video from the Keystone Market incident and denied an extension of the order.

July 28, 2026 — Criminal Cases

The November 30 incident resulted in two criminal cases: Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey, 2641CR0158, and Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau, 2641CR0159.

On July 28, 2026, both defendants submitted to facts sufficient to support findings of guilty on assault and battery. Both received six-month continuances without findings, fifty-yard stay-away orders, and no-contact provisions.

Hennessey also faced a malicious-destruction charge involving the phone. That charge was continued generally after a not-guilty plea, with $429.99 in restitution recorded for the destroyed telephone.

The proceedings were documented through correspondence from Jaime Baker, Victim/Witness Advocate for David E. Sullivan's Northwestern District Attorney's Office.

Related Federal Case

The document also cites Mlynick v. Town of Erving, 3:24-cv-30108, involving John Mlynick, Adam Paicos, Tucker Jenkins, Robert Holst, and Gregory Bardwell, before Judge Mark G. Mastroianni. The underlying case concerned a disputed dog seizure and arrest. The federal court allowed Mlynick's false-arrest claim against Paicos and Jenkins to proceed past the motion-to-dismiss stage. The document presents this as related procedural context rather than as part of the November 30 incident.

The record described in this document therefore consists principally of eyewitness statements, video, correspondence, affidavits, police material, court proceedings, and criminal dockets spanning six years.