My Turn: The Recorder promised to correct its mistakes. It hasn’t corrected mine.
On June 12, 2020, the Recorder ran a story below the fold on its front page, with my name in the headline and a photograph of my bench. A few pages inside the same edition, its then-editor wrote: “We own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism.” I have spent six years waiting for the paper to apply that sentence to the story on its own front page.
The story was “Artist’s work in question following petition,” published online June 11, 2020, as “Petition circulates to remove art of Shelburne business owner.” It was followed by “Bridge of Flowers Committee installs anti-racism memorial” on June 18, 2020. I am asking the Recorder to apply its own standard to both.
This is not a defense of every word I said on the Iron Bridge that morning, in frustration, after several minutes of being surrounded and told to leave a public bridge. It is about what the paper reported, and what it left out.
The first story called me the man “who people say disrupted” the silence. A week later, with no new reporting and no interview, the second story said flatly that I “disrupted a June 6 protest.” The attribution simply disappeared.
The first story reported that the petition had been taken down, but it gave only its author’s guess as to why. Change.org removed it for violating its policies on defamation and misinformation. Readers were never told. Nor were they told that a few weeks later the petition’s author wrote publicly that after talking with me she found me “very kind and understanding.”
The second story reported that the Bridge of Flowers Committee had consulted the petitioner “and several others involved in the protest” before hanging its sign. It did not mention that no one consulted me, the artist whose 17 years of work on the bridge the petition sought to remove. It described the sign’s location beside “a memorial water feature and stone bench,” placed “to be viewed from the bench.” It did not mention that the water feature is the Pothole Fountain I designed in 2011. Set into its stonework are polished black stones shaped like Africa, a tribute to the mason’s biracial daughters. That tribute had been in the ground for nine years.
The paper called the encounter a “13-minute recorded exchange.” The woman who stepped in told police that the interaction lasted almost 20 minutes and began before the camera did. The recording itself captures me saying, as my path was blocked, “You’re preventing my right of passage.” None of that was reported.
Since then I have written to the Recorder roughly 10 times asking for a correction or clarification. I have received no reply. In August 2025, the paper’s redesigned website put both stories back into circulation as archival content, unchanged and unannotated, near the top of any search for my name. For an artist who depends on commissions, that search result is his reputation.
Twice this year the paper has had related news in front of it. On March 2, 2026, its front page celebrated two people at the Winter HooPla on the same day criminal complaints were issued against them for assaulting me the previous November. On July 28, 2026, both admitted to facts sufficient to warrant guilty findings for assault and battery, and their cases were continued without a finding. As far as I can find, the Recorder has reported neither.
I am not asking the Recorder to take the 2020 stories down. I am asking for what its own editor described in that June 2020 edition: an editor’s note on each story, stating that the petition was removed by its host, that its author later revised her view, that the committee did not contact me, that the recording did not capture the start of the encounter, and that the fountain beside the committee’s sign holds a tribute I designed. That is five sentences, and it would cost nothing.
Seneca wrote that whoever decides anything without hearing the other side, even if he decides justly, is not just. I am asking to be heard, six years late, in the place where the story ran.
John F. Sendelbach lives in Shelburne Falls. He is a sculptor, metalworker and landscape designer whose public work includes the River Bench and the Pothole Fountain on the Bridge of Flowers.
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The Correction Would Be Free
A documented account of what the Greenfield Recorder printed about me, what it had in hand and left out, and why it has never corrected a word
The power to name
In fifth-century Athens, citizens could send a man into exile for ten years by scratching his name on a shard of pottery. Plutarch tells of a farmer who could not write, who handed his shard to a stranger and asked him to write the name Aristides on it. The stranger asked what Aristides had ever done to him. Nothing, the farmer said; he did not even know the man, he was simply tired of hearing him called “the Just.” The stranger was Aristides, and he wrote his own name. The story has survived twenty-four centuries because it describes something that does not change: a community can condemn a man without knowing him, and the condemnation feels to the people casting it like civic virtue rather than what it is.
Socrates understood the same danger from the other side. At his trial, as Plato records it, he told the jury that he feared his “first accusers” more than the men actually prosecuting him, because those first accusers were years of rumor and a comic play that had put a caricature of him on the stage, and rumor cannot be cross-examined. The ancient answer to this was not complicated. The Hebrew proverb says that the one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. Seneca put it in a single line of his Medea: whoever decides anything without hearing the other side, even if he decides justly, is not just. Every legal tradition that followed, from Roman law’s audi alteram partem to the notice-and-hearing requirements of our own due process clauses, is an elaboration of that one sentence. Hear the other side, and hear it before you decide.
What has changed since then is speed. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710 that “Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.” Swift was writing about pamphlets. In our time a video goes up, a comment thread decides what it means, a petition is drafted before supper, and by morning a list of businesses to avoid is circulating with a name and a street address on it. In the years since 2017, this machinery has exposed real wrongdoing that institutions had buried, and it has also flattened people who had done nothing the facts would support, because the machinery does not distinguish between the two. It holds no hearings and calls no one from the other side. Edward R. Murrow, answering the accusation machine of his own era in 1954, told his audience that we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty and that we would not walk in fear of one another.
The institution that is supposed to stand between a community and its first accusers is the local newspaper. It is the one place obliged to slow down, ask the person being named what happened, check the claims against the record, and, when it gets something wrong, say so where readers will see it. That is why a newspaper’s choices weigh more than a Facebook comment’s. When a stranger calls you a racist online, it is an opinion. When the paper of record prints that you disrupted a protest, it becomes a fact, carries the paper’s name, and sits at the top of every search for yours, indefinitely. For a man whose living depends on people hiring him to make permanent public work, that search result is the whole of his reputation to anyone who has not met him. A newspaper that lends its credibility to an accusation takes on a duty the crowd never had, and it does not get to set that duty down because the story is old, because the reporter has moved on, or because correcting it would be awkward for people it knows.
On June 13, 2020, the day after the Greenfield Recorder put my name and my bench on its front page, its editor-in-chief, Joan Livingston, published a column with a sentence I have read many times since: “I want to emphasize the mistakes a newspaper, including the Recorder, makes in its coverage are public mistakes. And we own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism.” In the six years since she wrote that, the Recorder has not corrected, clarified, or updated a single word of what it published about me, and it has not answered any of the roughly ten letters I have sent asking it to. What follows is the record of what the paper printed, what it had in front of it and chose not to print, and what it has done with those stories since, built from its own pages, its own Facebook thread, court records, and recordings made by the people it quoted.
Before the video
A cancellation requires that the person being cancelled have no history worth consulting, so it is worth setting down the history that was available to anyone who looked. I am a sculptor, metalworker, landscape designer, and nurseryman, trained in floriculture and ornamental horticulture at Cornell, and I have been making permanent public work in western Massachusetts for about thirty-five years. In 1998 my Crossroads Salamander won first place from the Public Arts Commission for Cushman Common in North Amherst. In 2002 I installed the plaques of the Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence, drilling the anchor holes by hand into slanted granite, eighteen years before the vocabulary of anti-racism was turned on the man who had done that work. In 2003 came the Mill Canal Newt at the Mill River Recreation Area in Amherst; in 2006 the Minuteman Crossing Stone Plaza at the University of Massachusetts, hand-laid Ashfield schist that received an Honor Award from the western Massachusetts chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2014. In Greenfield, a mile from the courthouse that figures later in this story, Brookie the Trout leaps in River Works Park, ten feet of stainless steel cutlery donated by Franklin County residents. At the Culinary Institute of America stands Old Diamondsides, a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon of seventeen hundred salvaged utensils with hand-blown glass eyes.
I have lived in Shelburne Falls since 2008, and for about nine years I ran a working, selling studio at 44 State Street, roughly four hundred feet from the Iron Bridge. From 2003 until 2020, without a break, I made work for the Bridge of Flowers, the converted trolley trestle that is the village’s best-known attraction: the River Bench, the Trolley Gate, and, in 2011, the Pothole Fountain at the Shelburne entrance garden, designed with the mason Paul Forth to evoke the glacial potholes in the riverbed below. Set into the stonework of that fountain, as part of the design I approved, are polished black stones shaped like the African continent, placed as a tribute to Paul’s biracial daughters and to his partner’s design vision. They were in the ground nine years before anyone in the village used the word petition about me, and they are still there.
None of this makes a man incapable of doing something wrong on a given Saturday morning. It does mean that anyone who wanted to know whether the artist being named was the kind of person the petition described had a public record to check, most of it within a short drive of the newspaper’s office, and a fountain three feet from where the Bridge of Flowers Committee would hang its response. No one at the Recorder checked it, and no one at the committee mentioned it.
June 6, 2020
June 6, 2020 was a Saturday, the first retail weekend after Massachusetts entered Phase II of its pandemic reopening. Small businesses in the village had spent nearly three months with almost no traffic. That morning both bridges across the Deerfield River into Shelburne Falls, the only vehicle routes between the two halves of the village, were closed for a Black Lives Matter demonstration, and no one had told the business owners. I found out when I could not get to work. From my studio four hundred feet away I could hear the noise rolling down the river, and I walked toward it with my camera running, narrating what I saw: a closed road, a large crowd, police managing traffic. I was not wearing a mask. I have three medical conditions that prevent it, the governor’s order of the time expressly exempted people in my situation without requiring them to prove it, and I had not expected to find myself in a crowd of hundreds standing shoulder to shoulder.
What happened next is the part no published account has ever described. Joey Kotright was leading a bullhorn call-and-response; he would call out a line and the crowd would scream it back at full volume. A woman I had never met, Sonny Walters, came up close to me and began telling me I should not be saying what I was saying. I asked her to leave me alone, and when she persisted I asked her again, about three times in all. As the noise built and she kept at it, Katherine Hennessey and several others joined her, and I ended up with my back to the east railing of the bridge, surrounded, Hennessey a foot from my unmasked face. By my count about two minutes passed this way before anyone filmed anything. Somewhere in those minutes I had heard Kotright describe the two boys beside him, his own sons, as his “brown project,” and I remember thinking that if I had described a child of mine that way in reverse I would have been run out of town, and that no one in that crowd so much as blinked. I lost patience with the whole event, and I will not pretend otherwise.
I will set down exactly what I said, because everything in this account depends on the reader knowing I am not hiding it. When Kotright led the crowd in “I can’t breathe,” I answered it with “take your mask off.” When Hennessey’s daughter, Alouette Batteau, raised her phone and began streaming to Facebook Live, the first words the recording captures from me are “I’m not gonna be a slave like all these people on their knees to you,” followed seconds later by “we’ve already had a moment of silence.” Kotright held two silences that morning, and I kept talking into the second. On the recording I say that Black Lives Matter “creates chaos across the country,” that people should “do some research,” and that the town did not need to be shut down for this. I said those things in anger, in public, on a public bridge, to people who had surrounded me. Readers can judge them. Two other things are also on that recording and have never been reported. A woman crossing the bridge during the silence laughed and began singing “This Little Light of Mine,” and the people who would later say I broke the silence joined in. And when I tried to walk away and found my path blocked, the recording captures me saying, “Oh, this is illegal what you’re doing. You’re preventing my right of passage… You’re preventing me from moving now. You’re touching me.”
I did walk away, more than once. The group followed me across the bridge. I turned around, words were exchanged, I walked again, and I was followed again. Partway across, Hennessey waved to the police officers standing nearby, who had watched the whole sequence and did not come over. Near the Buckland end, members of the group linked elbows across the width of the bridge and would not let me pass, while officers stood perhaps twenty feet away. Frames from the recording at 1:59 and 2:06 show Hennessey, in a green headscarf, face to face with me at the stop sign. The recording runs thirteen minutes and twenty-six seconds. In the statement she gave police afterward, and later repeated to a court, Hennessey wrote that she “saw someone trying to talk to him” before she stepped in, that she “convinced Mr. Sendelbach to move towards the Buckland side of the bridge,” and that her daughter got “most of the interaction, which lasted almost 20 minutes,” on video. By the complainant’s own account, then, the encounter began before the camera did, and several minutes of it were never recorded at all.
The thread and the petition
Alouette Batteau posted the recording that morning with a caption saying that I had taken it upon myself “to disrupt a moment of silence with his bigotry and lack of compassion,” and that “we will not stand for this or any form of racism in our town.” By her mother’s later account it passed twenty thousand views. The comment thread that grew beneath it is the real founding document of everything that followed, and it is worth describing carefully, because the Recorder’s reporter would soon be working inside it.
The thread moved quickly from what happened on the bridge to what should happen to my business. One commenter, who wrote that she “was on the other side and had no idea this was happening,” proposed in the same exchange to “create a list of businesses that support anti-racist policy so we know where to shop locally,” and invited others to brainstorm it with her. Another asked, in capitals, for someone to post what business I owned so that “people of our community” would not support it, and within a few comments someone had supplied the trade, the street, and the neighboring brewery as a landmark. Others posted the phone number and email of the Shelburne Falls Business Association, urged people to boycott, suggested that grant committees remember my name, and asked whether my trout sculpture in Greenfield could be petitioned out as well. Hennessey posted the contact information for the Buckland Board of Health and wrote that she “kinda” wanted to stand in front of my shop with a sign. Some comments went further. One said he would have thrown me over the bridge, another that he would love to punch me, and another, “I would throw his camera in the water.” Alouette wrote that “it was a challenge not to deck him,” and later, to a commenter who defended me, that she was “pretty much done being peaceful with people who condone and perpetuate racism.”
The thread was not unanimous, and that matters for what came next. One man wrote that he had gone to my shop, talked with me, and found me “able to hear and acknowledge some BLM perspectives,” and that isolating me would not help. Another commenter pointed out that people with medical conditions were exempt from the mask order and could not be asked for documentation. Several defended my right to speak, and one wrote that she could see why the conversation had not moved down the street, given how it was delivered. A member of the Bridge of Flowers Committee wrote, “I’m on the committee myself,” and said she did not agree with removing my bench. And Hennessey, explaining herself, wrote that her goal “was merely to move him away and distract him so the protest could happen in peace,” and that “most people had no idea any of this was even happening. So. Mission Accomplished.”
In that same thread Bianca Cavanaugh-Green, posting as Bianca Rose, wrote that she wanted my “stupid bench out of our town,” asked for help figuring out how to petition for it, and posted the link to a Change.org petition titled “Remove John Sendelbach’s art from Shelburne Falls.” She had not been on the bridge. The petition said I had been “constantly smiling,” that I was “filled with so much hate, racism, disrespect, and ego,” and that “he also said ‘police lives matter most,’” a line that appears nowhere in either transcript of the recording. It gathered more than six hundred signatures in three days. On June 9, Change.org took it down for violating its policies on defamation and misinformation. Within days, a website that hosts petitions of nearly every description had looked at this one and decided it could not stay up. That finding, the first independent judgment anyone made about the campaign against me, is the one fact the Recorder would never print.
June 11: the first story
The Recorder’s reporter, Mary Byrne, was in the thread. Beneath the original video she wrote to the petitioner: “Hi! In case it goes to your spam folder, I just wanted to let you know I sent you a private message.” At 5:48 p.m. on June 11, 2020, the paper published her story online as “Petition circulates to remove art of Shelburne business owner,” and the next morning it ran on the front page of the print edition as “Artist’s work in question following petition,” with a photograph of my bench.
The article described me as the business owner “who people say disrupted a moment of silence at a recent protest,” an attribution rather than a finding. It summarized the thirteen-minute video as showing me “with protesters who are asking him to be quiet during the moment of silence,” and said that in it I “objected to remaining silent and expressed his issues with certain aspects of the Black Lives Matter organization.” It gave the petitioner, whom it identified as twenty-one, several paragraphs, including her view that “there’s a time and place for things” and her assurance that she was not trying to ruin my business. It quoted the chair of the Bridge of Flowers Committee, Annette Szpila: “If there was something that we could do that would be even more inclusive than (the bridge) is already, we would like to take that on.” It quoted the co-chair, Carol Angus, who said I had “always been a great supporter of the bridge and very responsive to us when we’ve had particular needs,” and then that “those of us who saw the video were very saddened and surprised to learn of his disruptive behavior toward what was a really positive demonstration.” It noted, helpfully, that I had another piece, Brookie, in Greenfield.
Of me, the article said one sentence: “Sendelbach, who was aware of the petition, declined to comment.” What I declined to do was comment on the existence of a petition. I was not asked what had happened on the bridge before the camera started, whether I had been surrounded, whether I had tried to leave, what my record was, or what was set into the fountain at the bridge’s entrance. A reporter who asks a man only whether he wishes to comment on a petition against him has asked the one question certain to produce no story, and then printed the absence of a story as if it were his.
The article did report that the petition had come down. It did not report why. It let the petitioner supply the explanation, that the petition “was likely removed from the site because it had been reported,” and printed that guess as the only account. When the Recorder shared the story on its Facebook page that evening, it added, “The petition has since been removed. Here is the updated story.” The comment thread under the paper’s own post filled with readers who saw the matter differently from the paper: one argued that people had “put their hands on him to unlawfully block his passage and silence him,” another that “the article just says he was critical of BLM. That’s not racist.” Others in the same thread compared me to Hitler and wondered whether “the closest grand wizard” would appreciate my work. The petitioner posted there too: “I would like to inform everyone that my petition was reported and taken down.” And then, a line the paper never followed up: “It looks like there has been a compromise made and I look forward to sharing the info once it’s ready to be announced.”
June 13 and June 15: a promise and a headline
The day after the front page, the Recorder’s editor-in-chief published the column quoted at the start of this account, promising that the paper owns up to its mistakes and corrects them because that “is part of responsible journalism.” Joan Livingston had run the paper since December 2018 and would run it until January 2022. I do not know what prompted her column, and I do not suggest it was about me. I quote it because it is the standard the paper set for itself, in print, at the precise moment it was publishing the stories this account is about, and because it is the standard against which the following six years should be measured.
Two days later, on June 15, Franklin County Now, the news site of Western Mass Media Group, the Saga Communications group that includes WHAI 98.3, published a story by Julie Cunningham under the headline “Agitated Business Owner Disrupts Black Lives Matter Protest In Shelburne Falls.” Where the Recorder had hedged with “people say,” the radio station’s headline stated the disruption as fact. Its sources were the video, which it embedded so that its audience could watch, and protesters it identified only as “unidentified.” It recorded no attempt to reach me at all, not even a “declined to comment.” It said it was “unclear” why the petition had been removed, without, so far as the story shows, asking the company that removed it. It misspelled my name once as “Sandelbach.” It also misquoted the line every account of that morning repeats: the recording has me saying “like all these people on their knees to you,” and the station printed “on my knees,” which turns the sentence into nonsense. To its credit, the story did print my words “we already had a moment of silence” and noted that protesters asked me to “give them a tiny bit of respect for eight minutes,” which is closer to the actual texture of the recording than anything in the Recorder. The page is still live inside the station’s 2026 website, uncorrected.
I include Franklin County Now because it shows the method was not one reporter’s lapse. In the same week, two newsrooms built their stories from the same two sources, a recording that began partway through an encounter and a petition its own host had already removed, and neither described what the recording’s own participants were saying about it in public, in writing, a scroll away from the video itself.
June 18: the plaque
One week after the first story, Byrne’s second article, “Bridge of Flowers Committee installs anti-racism memorial,” no longer said that people said I had disrupted anything. It said, flatly, that the petition “sought to remove a bench designed by a local artist, John Sendelbach, who disrupted a June 6 protest in solidarity with Black Lives Matter on the Iron Bridge.” Nothing new had been learned between June 11 and June 18 to turn an attribution into a fact. No one had interviewed me in the meantime, and the petition the attribution rested on had been taken down for defamation and misinformation. The paper simply stopped attributing it. Of everything the Recorder printed, that one dropped hedge is the clearest example of how a claim becomes a fact in a newspaper: not by being proven, but by being repeated without its source.
The article reported that the committee had installed a sign honoring victims of racial and ethnic violence and hate crimes, timed for Juneteenth, and Szpila explained that the decision followed the petition: “We wanted to honor the anti-racism spirit of the petition and began looking for appropriate ways the bridge might reinforce that ideal.” According to the committee’s press release, as the paper relayed it, the committee had “contacted Cavanaugh-Green and several others involved in the protest” to find a way to communicate the petition’s message. One of those others, it appears from the thread, was the woman who posted the video, who had written beneath it that she was “in contact with the Bridge of Flowers Committee brainstorming other ways to combat racism in the community.” The committee consulted the petitioner, whose petition had been removed, and the poster of the video. It did not contact the artist whose work of seventeen years the petition sought to remove, and the article did not mention that he had not been consulted. The petitioner’s “compromise” was, in other words, negotiated about me without me, and reported that way.
The article then walked its readers through the very ground I had built. It said the sign hung “on a wooden fence near a memorial water feature and stone bench at the entrance garden,” in the area “with several benches and the water feature known as the Stone Spring,” which it said had “always officially been considered a ‘Memory Area.’” Szpila explained that it seemed appropriate “to place a memorial plaque in that area to be viewed from the bench.” The article did not say who had designed the water feature, and it did not mention that set into its stonework since 2011 are the polished black stones shaped like Africa, a permanent tribute to a mason’s biracial daughters, approved in my design. The photograph that ran with the story centered the laminated sign; the stones are not in it. The committee’s answer to a petition calling me a racist was a temporary sign, tacked up a few feet from a permanent anti-racist work I had made nine years earlier, positioned to be viewed from the kind of bench the petition wanted removed. The newspaper described that spot in detail and left the earlier work out. The article closed by noting that the sign was temporary and that the committee planned “a permanent plaque or artwork conveying the same sentiments.” The permanent artwork conveying those sentiments was already there.
There was one more thing the Recorder did not tell its readers about the committee’s response. In late June 2020 the Bridge of Flowers Committee held Zoom meetings about removing my work from the bridge, and they were organized by Kay Berenson, the Recorder’s former publisher and the founder of its website, the channel that carried these stories beyond the paper’s print subscribers and that would, five years later, carry them again. She had lectured publicly on fake news. No one in those meetings contacted me. No Recorder article about the committee ever disclosed that a former publisher of the paper was helping direct its response. Years later, when I saw Berenson on Bridge Street and asked her politely why she had acted without ever reaching out to me, she called the police. A committee member later told me, to my face, that the committee had “thrown me under the bus.” Seventeen years of work on that bridge ended without a phone call, a letter, or a hearing.
What the paper had and left out
On June 20, two days after its news pages declared as fact that I had disrupted the protest, the Recorder’s opinion page carried a long firsthand account of that morning by the Rev. Kate Stevens, who had helped with outreach for the event and had asked several people to serve as peacekeepers “to deal with any hecklers or angry motorists.” She described arriving on the bridge, Joey Kotright leading a group from the Shelburne side chanting “Say his name,” his explanation of why he would kneel for three and a half minutes rather than lie down, the “I can’t breathe” call-and-response, and then the silence. It is a careful, moving piece of writing. The disruption the paper had just reported as fact does not appear in it anywhere. It is hard to believe she did not know about it: her column ran after both Recorder stories and the radio station’s, after the video had passed twenty thousand views, and she had recruited people specifically to handle hecklers. Either what I did that morning did not seem worth a sentence to someone who was there to record it, which fits Hennessey’s own “most people had no idea any of this was even happening,” or she knew and left it out. Either way, the Recorder’s own pages did not support its news story, two days after it ran.
The weeks that followed produced a great deal more that bore directly on what the Recorder had published, and none of it was reported. Walters and her daughter began holding nightly vigils at the bridge, and in a public thread organizing them, Walters wrote, “we never know when he will be there, we need more people out on every random night.” On June 28, I was talking calmly with Walters on the sidewalk when Hennessey and her daughter crossed the street toward us, and the recording of what followed captures Hennessey asking why I “keep coming out here causing problems,” my saying “you got like five people coming at me,” and Hennessey saying, “I don’t talk to KKK members, but you know, here we are,” followed by “I’m really sorry you’re so mentally ill” and “Do you like bothering children?” Near the end of that recording I began telling the group about my father, who grew up in Buffalo in the 1930s and carried a bigotry I spent my teenage years confronting. I got as far as “My father had a lot of bigotry” before someone said, “7:00. You know what? We have lives,” and the group left. The comment thread that night quoted the first half of the story as proof of my racism. The second half, about how I had challenged him for it, is on no one’s recording because no one stayed to hear it. On June 29, Brook Batteau told me on a public sidewalk to “go away… you got to go… you got to go now,” and I answered that I could stand where I was. Later on that recording someone tells me to “quit your white whining,” and a voice I identify as Hennessey’s says, “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.” I said sharp things on both of those days too, things I would not repeat in print, and the full recordings are posted with this account so that no one has to take my selection on faith.
The same day, June 29, the petitioner posted in a public thread: “I just had a conversation with John and he explained himself and I’m not saying what he said is OK but he was actually very kind and understanding. I just wanted to say this so that people knew.” In another thread, a young man who had been following the whole affair wrote that “this started when he was rightfully crossing the bridge and was harassed for walking through the Protest. His right of passage was restricted, that’s where you guys screwed up,” and that surrounding me was “making him feel like a caged rat.” The Recorder had quoted the petitioner at length on June 11. It never reported that she had changed her view of the man her petition targeted. It never reported that the petition’s host had found it defamatory. It never reported that the committee had consulted everyone but me. It never reported that the encounter it had described as a thirteen-minute exchange had, by the complainant’s own account, lasted almost twenty. All of this was public, most of it in writing, much of it in threads the paper’s reporter had already worked in. None of it ever appeared in the Recorder.
Six years
The cost of a story like this does not arrive all at once, and most of it never shows up anywhere a newspaper would look. That summer my landlord at 44 State Street, a man I respect, told me he was hearing from people who were unhappy that I was still there. I left the space I had worked in for nine years rather than put him in the middle of it, and the shop closed. An active commission relationship with the Culinary Institute of America, worth about fourteen thousand dollars, ended before its natural conclusion. Other clients cancelled and said why. For roughly six years I had no proper studio; I worked in a mill building where I could not weld, which for a metalworker is a little like a pianist working in a room without a piano. In 2021 I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which my physician has attributed to the sustained stress of what began that June. Over the same years, Hennessey filed some eight police reports against me without the department ever interviewing me about any of them; when a criminal harassment complaint built on her account finally reached a clerk-magistrate on June 6, 2023, three years to the day after the bridge, it ended in a finding of no probable cause. None of that reached the Recorder either. What reached everyone else, every time a prospective client typed my name, was the paper’s June 2020 framing.
I wrote to the Recorder about those articles roughly ten times over these years, to Joan Livingston while she was editor and to Dan Crowley after her. None of the letters received a reply. When I met Livingston on the street, she told me two things. The first was that the articles were in the archives and could not be taken down, which did not match what I had watched happen: for years the links were dead and the stories did not turn up in searches at all. The second was that she had been in treatment for cancer when the articles ran, and someone else had been editing. I believe her about that, and I am sorry she went through it. But the letters she never answered were written after her treatment, while she was back in the chair whose occupant had promised in print to correct the paper’s mistakes. Livingston left the editor’s office in January 2022 and now chairs the Buckland Select Board, re-elected to a three-year term in June 2026. She has not corrected the record from either seat.
The silence has not been total, and I want to be exact about that, because precision is the whole point of this account. On February 9, 2026, the Recorder published my “My Turn” column on modernizing and democratizing the governance of the Bridge of Flowers, a column that names the River Bench and the Pothole Fountain. The paper will print my opinions on its opinion page, where they read as one man’s view. What it will not do is revisit its news pages, where its reporters stated as fact things their own sources contradicted. That distinction is the heart of the matter. A newspaper’s authority lives on its news pages. An opinion column is something a paper hosts; a news story is something it vouches for. The Recorder has been willing to host me. It has never been willing to stop vouching for what it said about me.
August 2025: the stories come back
George Orwell described the Ministry of Truth’s method in a single sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four: the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. For years I assumed my problem was a version of that, a past that had gone dark. The links were dead. The stories did not appear in searches. I took the editor’s word that the archive was beyond anyone’s control, and I thought the June 2020 coverage might simply rot in a server somewhere, unread.
In August 2025, the Recorder redesigned its website, and both June 2020 articles came back, presented as newly added archival stories, with fresh URLs, fresh search indexing, and a place near the top of any search for my name. They were not corrected. They were not annotated. They carried no note that the petition they described had been removed by its host for defamation and misinformation five years earlier, no note that the petitioner had publicly called me “very kind and understanding” a few weeks after the first story ran, no note that the committee whose response the second story celebrated had never contacted me. The original framing was simply put back into circulation, at a moment when I was trying, after six years, to rebuild a commission practice that depends entirely on what strangers find when they look me up.
This was not an archive sitting passively on a shelf. A newspaper that takes stories which had been unreachable for years and actively republishes them, under its current name and on its current site, is making an editorial choice in 2025 about what to tell readers in 2025, and that choice carries the same duty the original publication did. Reissuing the stories cost the paper nothing. Reissuing them with three sentences noting what had happened since would have cost the same. Swift’s line about falsehood flying while truth limps after it was written about pamphlets that eventually yellowed and fell apart. A website redesign does not let anything yellow. It gives the old story a new birthday and sends it out again.
The racist cake
There is a brewery in the village called Floodwater Brewing, on the Buckland side, in a building that was gutted by the Deerfield River’s flood. I have a particular connection to it. When its owners were pouring the taproom floor, eight or ten volunteers were struggling with wet concrete that was hardening in the chute, and I stepped in, reorganized the pour, and screeded the floor on my knees for three or four hours. When one of the owners, Zachary Livingston, was deciding on a bar top, I suggested pure zinc sheet, gave him my leftover material and the name of my supplier, and showed him the soldering technique. Every keg in that building sits on a floor I laid, and every pint is served across a bar built with material and knowledge I gave away. Zachary Livingston is Joan Livingston’s son.
Some time after 2020, Floodwater’s official Instagram account posted a photograph of a cake from a birthday celebration in the taproom, with a cheerful caption promoting the next trivia night. The cake is a face. It is frosted dark brown, with round blue candy eyes, a sculpted nose, and enormous, bright pink lips pulled back from a row of teeth, a cigarette jutting from one corner of the mouth. Anyone who has handled early twentieth-century American postcards and advertising, as I have for years as a dealer in vintage photographs and ephemera, knows the visual vocabulary it draws on: the dark face, the oversized red or pink lips, the wide grin of teeth, the comic prop. It is the grammar of the minstrel caricature, printed by the million on cards that were sold in drugstores and mailed as jokes. The post drew thirty-five likes and a comment calling it a “fabulous cake.” After people objected, Livingston apologized.
I do not claim to know what anyone at Floodwater intended, and I am not going to do to Zachary Livingston what was done to me. I do not think a single bad social media post should define a person, and I have reason to be grateful to him, as the next section of this account will show. My point is not about him. It is about everyone else. The same village that, in June 2020, produced a viral thread, a boycott list, a petition, a committee response, two front-page news stories, and a radio station headline over things a man said in anger on a bridge, produced nothing at all over a business’s own public post of an image in the minstrel tradition. There was no thread demanding a list of businesses to avoid. There was no petition. There was no committee plaque. There was no Recorder article. Many of the people who had been loudest about my words in 2020 were, and are, regulars and performers at that same brewery. The paper that found the removal of a petition about me worth a story and a sign about me worth a second one found nothing worth reporting here.
I raise it because it is the cleanest test I know of whether what happened to me in 2020 was about racism or about me. If the standard the village applied to me were a standard, it would have applied here, to a business owned by the son of the editor who promised in print to correct the paper’s mistakes. It did not apply. The standard was never the point. The target was.
November 30, 2025, and the front page
In September 2024, Hennessey wrote to the new owner of the mill building where I then worked, asking him to evict me. “He’s a menace to the community,” she wrote, “and it’s really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.” The owner, Brad Walker, declined. Evicting me over a personal conflict, he wrote back, “none of which to my knowledge has resulted in criminal or civil judgements against him,” would tell every tenant that their workspace was at the mercy of community grievances, and he offered to put a hundred dollars toward any independent mediator she chose. She replied that she would discuss it with her lawyer. Nothing further came of it.
Fourteen months later, at about 5:32 p.m. on November 30, 2025, on the sidewalk outside Floodwater Brewing, someone did get hurt. Brook Batteau came out of the brewery and shoved me with both hands off the curb onto the pavement, then got on me and began punching. Hennessey came out seconds later. With my arms held from behind, she struck me repeatedly in the head and face. My phone had fallen to the road, still recording. She picked it up, walked it about seventy-five feet to the bank of the Deerfield River, and threw it in. Then she came back. Eight or ten adults were on the sidewalk, and no one stepped in. I did not hit anyone back; I screamed for help. In June 2020, a commenter under the video had written, “I would throw his camera in the water.” Five and a half years later, someone did.
The person who came over afterward was Zachary Livingston. He handed me my shoe, and he asked Batteau why he had pushed me. Batteau answered, “You don’t understand, John has been after my family for five years.” Livingston told him, “But you still shouldn’t have pushed him,” and on December 9, 2025, he gave a sworn statement to police recording that exchange. I want to give him his due plainly, for the same reason I declined to make the previous section about him: the son of the editor whose paper launched this story was, when it counted, the one person on that sidewalk who told the truth about what he saw, under oath. That is more than his mother’s newspaper has managed in six years.
The day after the assault, December 1, Hennessey filed a sworn complaint asking a court to protect her from me. Among the dates she listed as acts of harassment by me was November 30, 2025, the day she had struck me and thrown my phone into the river. On December 15, Judge William Mazanec, who had vacated an earlier emergency order she obtained against me in 2023 once he heard the recording she had described, denied the petition. On March 2, 2026, Greenfield District Court issued criminal complaints: against Hennessey for assault and battery and for malicious destruction of property, against Batteau for assault and battery.
That same day, March 2, 2026, the Recorder’s front page carried a full-color photograph from the Art Garden’s tenth Winter HooPla in the old railyard: a bonfire, lanterns, puppets, and, at the center of the frame, Hennessey and Batteau, Hennessey with her arms spread wide in the firelight. The headline was “It’s art and community.” Hennessey was described as “the keeper of the flame” and quoted saying that “every year the HooPla gets a little bigger and a little brighter.” I do not suggest the paper knew about the complaints when it went to press; the coincidence of dates is simply what it is. But it is worth sitting with what that front page told the village about two people who, that same morning, had been formally charged with beating a man on a public sidewalk, one of whom, three months earlier, had told a court in a sworn affidavit that she wore a papier-mâché frog mask to a November public art event because she “suspected Mr. Sendelbach might show up… and didn’t want him to recognize me.”
They were arraigned on April 7, 2026, pleaded not guilty, and were released on conditions that they stay away from me and have no contact with me. On July 28, 2026, before Judge Mazanec, each of them submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on the charge of assault and battery. Each case was continued without a finding for six months, under the supervision of the Greenfield District Court Probation Department, on the condition that they stay fifty yards away from me and have no contact with me. Hennessey’s property charge was continued generally under Chapter 276, Section 87, with the same conditions and an order to pay $429.99 in restitution, the cost of the phone. As far as I have been able to find, the Recorder has never reported the complaints, the arraignment, or the outcome. The paper that put the removal of a petition about me on its front page has not told its readers that the keeper of the flame and the man beside her admitted to facts sufficient to find them guilty of assaulting me.
The unforgiving town
On May 15, 2026, the Recorder published a warm review, by its longtime food and culture columnist, of Joan Livingston’s novel The Unforgiving Town. Its protagonist, Al Kitchen, returns to a fictional hilltown after seventeen years in prison for manslaughter. He wants only to live quietly. The town will not let him. He ends up dead on a back road, mourned by a single cousin. The reviewer admired the book’s compassion for a man the community has decided it will never forgive, and hoped that if this criminal could reform, so could any of us.
I have no idea whether Livingston had anything like my situation in mind, and I do not suggest that she did. Writers draw on many things, and the novel deserves to be read on its own terms. But I have lived in this valley for eighteen years, almost exactly as long as Al Kitchen served, and the difference between his story and mine is the whole of this account. Al Kitchen’s town had something real to hold against him. He had killed a man. The town’s refusal to forgive him was disproportionate and cruel, but it had a factual anchor. Mine was handed a recording that began partway through an encounter, a petition its own host removed for defamation, and two news stories that never carried the facts their own reporter had within reach, and the paper that ran those stories has spent six years declining to revisit them, even as it reissued them, celebrated two people who later admitted sufficient facts for assaulting me, and, on its book page, praised its former editor’s empathy for an outcast. The town in the novel is unforgiving because it will not forgive a man who actually did something. The town I live in has been unwilling even to look at what it decided about me, and the institution whose job it was to look has been the most unwilling of all.
What a correction would take
Massachusetts knows better than any place in America what it looks like when a community convicts first and examines later, and it also knows what a correction looks like. In 1692 the Salem courts hanged nineteen people on the strength of accusations and spectral evidence that no one could test. Five years later, in January 1697, Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, stood in his pew in Boston’s South Meeting House while a statement he had written was read aloud, taking “the Blame and Shame of it” and asking pardon of God and men, and twelve of the jurors signed a public declaration that they had been sadly deluded and mistaken. The colony began reversing the convictions in 1711, and the Commonwealth was still clearing the last names in 2001 and 2022. It is a long, slow, imperfect record, but it establishes the principle: the people who lent their authority to an accusation owe the public a correction, in the open, in their own names, even when it is late and even when it is embarrassing. Sewall managed it in five years, with the blood of nineteen people on the record. The Recorder has had six, with nothing on its record but a few paragraphs it will not revisit.
My case is small. It involves one artist, one bench, one village, and a regional daily with a shrinking newsroom. That is exactly why it matters. Most people wrongly named in the news are not public figures with lawyers and publicists. They are shopkeepers, teachers, tradesmen, and neighbors, named in a local paper on the strength of a viral clip and an online petition, with no platform from which to answer except the one that named them. When that platform will not answer their letters, the story becomes permanent by default. A boycott list becomes a lost lease. A petition its host took down becomes a front page that never comes down. A comment that imagined throwing a man’s camera into the river becomes, five years later, a phone at the bottom of the Deerfield. None of that requires a newspaper to intend harm. It only requires the paper to repeat the accusation, decline to hear the accused, and then decline to look again.
The remedy has never been complicated, and it has never been expensive. It is the one Joan Livingston described in her own column: own the mistake, and correct it, in public, where the original ran. A note appended to each of the June 2020 articles would need only a few sentences. The petition described in these stories was removed by Change.org for violating its policies. Its author later wrote publicly that after speaking with Mr. Sendelbach she found him “very kind and understanding.” The Bridge of Flowers Committee did not contact Mr. Sendelbach before responding to the petition, and the Recorder did not disclose that its former publisher helped organize that response. The thirteen-minute video described here did not capture the beginning of the encounter, which by a participant’s own account lasted nearly twenty minutes. The water feature beside the committee’s sign, designed by Mr. Sendelbach in 2011, includes stones honoring a mason’s biracial daughters. That would take an editor an afternoon.
James Baldwin wrote in 1962 that not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Nothing in this account has been faced by the institution that set it in motion. The stones are still in the ground at the Pothole Fountain. They do not need the committee’s acknowledgment or the Recorder’s ink; they will be there long after the laminated sign has faded and the website has been redesigned again. That is the consolation of working in stone and steel. But a man is not a fountain, and a reputation is not granite. It is made of what people read about you, and for six years what they have read about me is a story the paper that published it knows to be incomplete. The Unforgiving Town sells for $14.99. The correction would be free.