The Charge With No Evidence Six Years, One Bench, and the Silence of Shelburne Falls · John F. Sendelbach · Oct 18, 2026

The Charge With No Evidence

Six Years, One Bench, and the Silence of Shelburne Falls · John F. Sendelbach · Oct 18, 2026

Prologue: The Bench on the Hill

There is a polished stone bench in a hilltop cemetery in Buckland, looking out over the Clesson Brook valley, and I made it. Years before any of what follows, a Jewish woman in this valley commissioned stone sculptures from me, pieces for her husband that stayed in the home they shared for the rest of her life. After she died, her husband and daughters came to me with a request that was as intimate as any I have received in thirty-five years of this work. They asked me to move large stones from their own land up to the cemetery, to polish one of them into a bench in her memory, and to shape it to receive a bronze plaque that would tell her story. I did that. The bench is there, and anyone can walk up the hill and sit on it.

I was finishing the installation when the chimes in the bell tower of the church nearby began to play Amazing Grace. I had never heard it that way before, live, carrying across a hilltop, and I stopped working and listened. A Jewish family, a stone from their own ground, a cemetery above the brook valley, and that hymn coming through the air over all of it. I did not plan it and could not have. It remains one of the most moving moments of my working life, and I set it down here not as sentiment but as evidence, because of what was later said about me.

In June 2020, in a public Facebook thread under a video of me that had been watched some twenty thousand times, a woman named Janice Sorenson wrote this: "I 'unfriended' him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice. And yet something does not feel completely right about planning his full demise." She wrote it after hundreds of comments had already called me a racist, a bigot, a KKK member and a man "channeling the Grand Wizard," and had urged that I be thrown off the bridge. She offered no incident, no quote, no date and no witness, and no one else in those threads supplied any. The first sentence stated an accusation of antisemitism as settled fact. The second, read plainly, tells you what the thread around it was doing.

Three years later, on June 14, 2023, on Conway Street in Buckland, her partner, Michael Hoberman, a professor at Fitchburg State University whose field is Jewish American history and folklore and who sits on the Buckland Planning Board, looked at me and said, "You are an antisemite." I had never exchanged a word with him before that moment. I reported the encounter to police the same day. Neither of them has ever produced a single fact to support what they said, and neither has ever withdrawn it.

This is the most serious accusation made against me in six years, and it is the one with the least behind it. No one has ever supported it with a statement of mine, a post, an incident or a witness. In May and June of 2026 I put the full counter-record in front of Professor Hoberman, his university, and the regional Jewish institutions and publications whose work is to guard the meaning of that charge. None of them replied. What follows is the whole story of the six years in which that accusation was made and left standing, told in order, with every claim tied to the document or the witness it comes from, so that the charge can finally be corrected in public, where it was made.

1. Before the Bridge

By June 2020 I had spent three decades putting permanent work into the public ground of western Massachusetts, and that record is the baseline against which everything after it has to be measured. I graduated from Cornell in 1989 with a degree in floriculture and ornamental horticulture, and I later studied landscape architecture at UMass Amherst in the METLAND tradition of Julius Fábos and Jack Ahern, which taught me to read a landscape as a system of water, history and human use before putting anything into it. I came to sculpture and metalwork through that landscape work, building slabs, footings, walls and foundations for design-build clients, and the habit of working in stone, steel and concrete at the scale of a site never left me.

The public commissions came steadily. In 1998 I made the Crossroads Salamander in Amherst. In 2002 I aligned and set the Sojourner Truth Memorial plaques in Florence, drilling the anchor holes by hand into slanted granite, eighteen years before anyone in this region thought to question my commitments on race. In 2005 I built Minuteman Crossing at UMass Amherst, which received an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects Western Massachusetts in 2014. In 2013 I made Brookie the Trout for Greenfield, and in 2015 Old Diamondsides, a sturgeon, for the Culinary Institute of America. Each of these is still standing where it was installed, and each was commissioned by an institution that vetted me before it put my work in front of the public.

The Bridge of Flowers holds three of my pieces. In 2010 I made the Trolley Gate, a steel gate that recalled the trolley line the bridge was built to carry. In 2011 I designed the Pothole Fountain at the bridge's entrance, approved by Julie Petty, who chaired the Bridge of Flowers Committee at the time. The mason Paul Forth built it with me, and set into its stone paving the Black Stones of Africa, polished stones in the shape of the African continent, a design that grew out of his family's wish to honor his two biracial daughters. I approved it and he executed it, and those stones were in the ground nine years before a petition accused me of racial bias. In 2014 I added the River Bench. I gave the bridge years of volunteer work on top of these pieces, which is why the gate, when it was finally returned to me in 2026, was returned as mine.

The village itself carries more of my work. I built a functional bench on Bridge Street in direct collaboration with Mohammad Yaseen, a Palestinian man whose family has members sheltering in Gaza today. I made the bench outside Mo's Fudge Factor on my own. And the work I did for Jewish clients in this valley sits alongside all of it. Beyond the memorial bench on the Buckland hillside, a local Jewish man commissioned a sephirot from me, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life rendered in polished stone, to display his collection of raw emeralds. One of my five dearest friends is a Jewish man I met in 1991, when I was in the landscape architecture graduate program at UMass and he was finishing a late undergraduate degree in his thirties. He trusted me from the start, and he taught me some of my first chords and first songs on the guitar, which I still use every time I pick one up, including when I play Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Wyclef Jean. None of this is offered as a credential. It is offered because an accusation of antisemitism, if it were true, would have left some trace in a life lived this publicly, and what it left instead is stone.

From 2011 to 2020 I kept my studio and storefront at 44 State Street on the Buckland side of the village, nine years of making and selling work in full view of anyone who walked by. When I left it in 2020, I left to spare my landlord, a friend, the pressure that was by then being aimed at the building. A few steps down State Street, at number 40, stood the building that became Floodwater Brewing, and I had a hand in building it. The zinc bar top was my idea. I trained Zachary Livingston to make it and sold him the extra material I had on hand. When he was pouring the concrete slab in the basement that the brewing tanks would sit on, with a full truck of concrete arriving and a crew of eight who had not done a pour like it, I stepped in and ran it, because at that moment I had more experience with concrete than everyone else in that basement combined. I mention it because that building returns in this story, and because the people in it knew me before any of this began.

One warning sign came before June 2020, and it came from inside the committee's circle. On August 26, 2019, Joanne Soroka, now the longest-serving member of the Bridge of Flowers Committee, sent me an email that read, in part, "you don't know who you are fucking with… it will get ugly." I reported it to police. No action followed. Ten months later, the committee she sits on would meet privately to discuss removing my work from the bridge, and it would not call me. I did not understand at the time what that email foretold. I understand it now.

2. June 6 and the First Week

On Saturday, June 6, 2020, in the third month of the pandemic, a protest closed the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls without notice to the people who make their living on that crossing, and by the end of the following two weeks I had been recast, in front of the whole valley, as the enemy of everything the protest stood for. The ceremony on the bridge was led by Joey Kotright, who knelt for three and a half minutes calling out "I can't breathe" before the crowd sat in silence. Rev. Kate Stevens of Trinity Church later wrote that she had not been part of planning the rally, but that she had helped with outreach and "had asked several people to do peacekeeping to deal with any hecklers or angry motorists." She knew I was there, because she personally told me to put on a mask. Her husband, John, was on the bridge too, and he is visible in the video while the crowd closed around me.

I went out onto the bridge because an unannounced closure on a pandemic Saturday was blocking access to my business and the other shops along the crossing, and because I objected to adults staging a political event of that intensity with children in the middle of it. My objection was to the adults. I did not address the children and I did not threaten anyone. Sonseniora Walters approached me first and kept at me after I asked her to leave. Catherine Hennessey, one of the peacekeepers, stood face to face with me and locked her elbows to block my path. Her own account in the Facebook thread afterward said she had stepped in to calm things down.

Hennessey's adult daughter, Alouette Batteau, filmed the encounter on Facebook Live. The clip that went out began only after roughly two minutes of exchanges had already taken place, so what viewers saw was the end of an argument with its beginning cut away. It was watched some twenty thousand times. A follow-up reel was posted on June 29. The original video stayed up for almost five years and was taken down on March 18, 2025.

Within days, Bianca Cavanaugh-Green launched a Change.org petition built on that clip, titled "Remove John Sendelbach's art from Shelburne Falls." By the Recorder's own reporting, it drew more than six hundred signatures in three days before Change.org removed it on Friday, June 12, 2020, and Cavanaugh-Green told the paper it had likely been taken down because it had been reported. The petition said I had been "very hostile," that I "thought this was funny," that I was "constantly smiling" and had invaded people's space without a mask, and that I had said "police lives matter most." It named my bench on the bridge, added that there were "other pieces he made too through the town," and asked for art "from local artists who are kind and loving people, Not art made by someone who is filled with so much hate, racism, disrespect, and ego." After she and I later talked, Cavanaugh-Green posted that I had been "actually very kind and understanding" toward her, and in the same breath that she still stood by the petition.

The comment threads under the video and under the Recorder's coverage ran to roughly two hundred and ten comments. People wrote "Throw him off the bridge" and "I would throw his camera in the water." They called for a boycott of my business and asked one another which shop was mine. They listed my public works one by one so the petition would know what to target. Over those threads I was called a racist, a bigot, a KKK member, a man "channeling the Grand Wizard," a child predator and a woman harasser. Chad Flasinski, who now sits on the steering committee of the Shelburne Falls Alliance, joined in. While others were cataloging my work for removal, he added to the list my museum work, the sculpture at the Culinary Institute of America and the bench at Mo's Fudge Factor, and then followed up with "yup... tons of stuff."

Rhonda Anderson, the Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, a seat on a state commission, wrote that she had known me for about fourteen years. She called me "a little unhinged" and "a conspiracy theorist type," and she wrote that "there are restraining orders against him for holding this grudge and harassing women he feels are involved, including me." There were no restraining orders. Facebook's edit history shows her later changing that sentence to "there were efforts towards restraining orders," and adding that being tagged "isn't making me feel very safe." She acknowledged that she had not been on the bridge.

About two-thirds of the way through one of those threads, Janice Sorenson wrote the sentence this account exists to answer: "I 'unfriended' him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice. And yet something does not feel completely right about planning his full demise." No one asked her what she meant. No one asked for an example, and she gave none. The timing matters as much as the words. By the point she wrote, the threads had already run to hundreds of comments. People had already urged others to "throw him off the bridge." They had already called me a racist and a bigot, a KKK member, a man "channeling the Grand Wizard." She did not walk into a calm conversation and raise a concern. She walked into a pile-on that was already calling for my work to be removed from the bridge and the town, and she added a new charge to it, antisemitism, stated as common knowledge. It sat there uncorrected and traveled with everything else.

On Saturday, June 13, 2020, the weekend edition of the Greenfield Recorder put Mary Byrne's story on its front page under the headline "Artist's work in question following petition," with the subhead "Request to remove bench comes after disruption of moment of silence" and a photograph of my bench on the bridge. The paper's website shows the story first published on the evening of June 11. The caption said the petition had called for the bench's removal "in response to Sendelbach's disrupting a moment of silence for George Floyd." The story itself reported that the petition had already been removed from Change.org. So the front page asked whether my work was in question over a petition that no longer existed, and it repeated the petition's version of June 6 as the reason. Byrne built the story from the video and from Cavanaugh-Green, who was twenty-one and told the paper she was not trying to ruin my business. The story described "the 13-minute recorded exchange" as one in which I "objected to remaining silent and expressed [my] issues with certain aspects of the Black Lives Matter organization." Committee chair Annette Szpila said the committee had not formally received the petition but that members had "begun to have conversations about it," and that "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." Co-chair Carol Angus said that I had "always been a great supporter of the bridge and very responsive to us when we've had particular needs," and in the next breath that those who saw the video "were very saddened and surprised to learn of his disruptive behavior." What she really read in the petition, she said, was "the positive move toward something inclusive, to have some representation on the bridge by an artist of color." The story noted that I was aware of the petition and declined to comment.

The same June 13 edition carried a My Turn column by Joan Livingston, the paper's editor-in-chief, titled "Putting things into perspective." It explained how the paper had handled reader complaints about a headline and a photo caption on other stories that week, and it set out the paper's standard plainly: "I want to emphasize the mistakes a newspaper, including the Recorder, makes in its coverage are public mistakes. And we own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism." She was not writing about me. But that is the standard her paper set for itself in the very edition that put me on its front page, and it is the standard I would spend the next six years asking it to meet.

On June 18, Byrne followed with "Bridge of Flowers Committee installs anti-racism memorial," updated online the next day. The committee had hung a temporary sign honoring victims of racial and ethnic violence on the fence beside "a memorial water feature and stone bench" in the Shelburne-side entrance garden, in time for Juneteenth. That water feature is my Pothole Fountain, and set into its paving are the Black Stones of Africa, placed there nine years earlier to honor two biracial girls. Neither the sign, nor the committee's press release, nor the story said a word about what those stones were or who had put them there, and the photograph that ran with the story was framed so that the stones are not visible. Szpila said the sign 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." She said the committee had also "considered looking for artwork done by a black artist." According to the committee's own release, it contacted Cavanaugh-Green and several others involved in the protest. It did not contact me. And by this second story the paper had stopped attributing anything: it described me, in its own voice, as the artist "who disrupted a June 6 protest." No one from the Recorder contacted me for that story at all.

On June 20, Rev. Stevens published a My Turn column in the Recorder about the June 6 rally. She wrote: "We cannot forget; we need to keep asking questions; we need to listen; we need to learn the real United States history and hear all the stories that have not been told." Her column described the emotional weight of the day in detail. It did not mention me, though by then the rally had become a petition, a front-page story and a plaque on the bridge, and, by my account, one of the peacekeepers she had recruited had stood in my path.

Before June was out, I had a recording of my own. In it, Catherine Hennessey says to me: "Yeah, I hate you. Really do… That's not against the law." On a June 29 recording made on her own devices, she can be heard coaching her husband on what he supposedly witnessed, for the purpose of a police report, and saying, "I really don't care about your life." Within the same days, she filed the first of the police reports that would follow me for the next five years.

3. The Committee, the Paper, and the First Silence

While the petition circulated in June 2020, the Bridge of Flowers Committee met privately over Zoom to discuss removing my work from the bridge, and no one on the committee ever called me. I learned how those meetings went from inside the committee. Ann Lofquist, a committee member, had a studio about ninety feet from mine at the Mill, and for a time we were friends. In 2021 she told me plainly that the committee had thrown me under the bus. She also told me that the Zoom meetings were led by Kay Berenson, publisher of the Greenfield Recorder from 1996 to 2009, a former president of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, and a Shelburne Falls resident who describes herself as an advocate for "the public's right to information about government actions." Months later I stopped speaking with Lofquist, for my own reasons. Nothing in that falling-out changes what she told me, or the fact that she told me as a friend, and no one on the committee has said anything since to contradict it.

The committee that held those meetings is not a public body, though it runs a public bridge. The Bridge of Flowers belongs to the Shelburne Falls Fire District. Since 1929 it has been managed by a subcommittee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club, a private organization whose own page on the bridge's website states that "membership is open to all women in the West County area and beyond." Seats are filled by internal nomination. There are no elections, no term limits, no open meetings and no published minutes a citizen can read, and I have found no public record of any formal delegation from the Fire District to the club. Every member on the committee's 2026 roster is a woman, and no man in either town can serve on the body that decides what stands on a public crossing. That was the room in which the fate of my work was discussed in June 2020, without me in it.

The newspaper did no better. Over the following years I sent the Recorder roughly ten letters, with evidence, setting out what the June 2020 coverage had left out and asking it to meet the standard its own editor-in-chief had set out in print: to own up to its mistakes and correct them. No correction was ever printed. No letter was answered. The two June stories remained online exactly as they ran, and in August 2025 they surfaced again in the paper's archive pages, five years older and no more accurate.

In March 2021, Virginia Ray joined the Bridge of Flowers Committee. She had been a daily beat reporter for the Recorder from 1993 to 2005, covering these West County towns, and she describes herself as editor and publisher of the Shelburne Falls & West County Independent since 2005. On her own professional profile she describes her role on the committee this way: "I volunteer as secretary and assist with PR." From that point on, the committee that had discussed my work behind closed doors had a career journalist in the room helping with its public relations, and the paper that had covered the petition had one of its own alumni inside the institution it had covered. In the five years since, neither has asked me a single question.

The pressure did not stay on the bridge. By the end of 2020 it had reached the building at 44 State Street, where I had kept my studio and storefront for nine years. My landlord was a friend, and I left that fall to spare him what was being aimed at his building. In late fall 2020 I moved my workspace into the Mill, where I would work for the next five years, ninety feet from a committee member's studio, in a village that had decided what I was without asking me.

4. The Two Ledgers

From 2020 through 2023, Catherine Hennessey filed roughly eight police reports about me, and the record shows two ledgers kept side by side: hers, which the police acted on without hearing from me, and mine, which went nowhere. The reports are written in the department's own words. Report 21BUC-54-OF, dated July 13, 2021 and written by Sergeant Kurt Gilmore, records that speaking with me "doesn't work" and advises Hennessey to seek a harassment order. No interview with me is recorded. Report 23SHL-8-AR, dated March 2, 2023, by Officer Christopher Pettengill and Detective Tucker Jenkins, takes down Hennessey's account of eight separate incidents and advises her to file for a harassment prevention order, which a court granted the next day. Again, no interview with me is recorded. In each case the department took one side's account, did not take the other, and pointed the complainant toward a court.

When those accounts reached a neutral reader, they did not hold. The criminal harassment complaint that grew out of the March 2023 report went before a clerk-magistrate, who on June 6, 2023 found no probable cause, under docket 2341AC000088. Judge William F. Mazanec III later vacated the 2023 harassment prevention order after listening to audio of what had actually happened. A charge that the police had treated as established for years did not survive the first person whose job it was to weigh the evidence.

My own complaints met a different path. When I reported what was being done to me, the reports were routed elsewhere or not acted on, and the fact that I had no record of enforcement against Hennessey was treated as though it meant nothing had happened to me. The absence of a file was read as the absence of conduct, but only in one direction. On July 1, 2023, the Shelburne and Buckland departments merged under Chief Gregory Bardwell, and the pattern continued under the new name.

Eight days after the clerk-magistrate found no probable cause, on June 14, 2023, I saw Janice Sorenson riding her bicycle past the barrel obstructions on Conway Street in Buckland. It was the first time I had seen her since June 2020. I asked her to come back and talk, and she agreed, riding back about a hundred feet to my car. I asked her why she had written that Jewish people were my "target of choice." She said she could not remember writing it, so I read her the exact words. The conversation sharpened. I had been leaning out of the car window with my neck twisted sideways, and I got out to talk on level ground. In my account, she took that as an escalation, dropped her bike, came at me from about ten feet away and stopped within a foot of my face with her fists clenched.

Michael Hoberman stepped in and pulled her back by the elbows. As he turned his head toward me, he said: "You are an antisemite." I said, "You just assaulted me." Sorenson shouted, "I didn't touch you." Then they left. I had never spoken a word to Hoberman before that moment, and he had no more evidence for what he said than she had offered three years earlier. He did not ask me a question. He did not cite a statement, a post or an incident. He simply repeated, in person and with the weight of his profession behind it, the sentence she had posted in 2020.

That same day I filed a police report with Sergeant Budrewicz [report number], and I sent the two of them a letter of intent to sue for defamation and civil assault, offering to accept published letters of apology in the Greenfield Recorder and the Daily Hampshire Gazette in place of damages. Neither the police report nor the letter produced any response. There was no investigation, no follow-up call and no reply. A professor of Jewish American history had called me an antisemite on a public street, and the only institution that recorded it was the one I walked into myself.

The pressure reached my landlord a year later. On September 6, 2024, Hennessey wrote to Brad Walker of Below The Dam LLC, the new owner of the Mill, asking him to evict me. Her letter called me a menace, said that she, "along with many other women in the community," could no longer attend events at the Mill, and warned that "it's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." On September 7, Walker wrote back that he would not evict a legacy tenant over a personal conflict, "none of which to my knowledge has resulted in criminal or civil judgements against him," because doing so would tell every other tenant that their workspace was not safe from the whims of management or community grievances. He offered a hundred dollars toward a professional mediator for ninety minutes with all of us. On September 9, Hennessey answered that she would discuss it with her lawyer. She did not take the mediation. Outside a courtroom, Walker was the first person with power over my livelihood to look at the accusations, notice that no court had ever found against me, and say so in writing.

5. The River and the Docket

In 2025 the five-year pattern turned physical, and on November 30 it ended with two people beating me on a public sidewalk and one of them throwing my phone into the Deerfield River. Both later admitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery. The year began badly in court. In March 2025 I petitioned for harassment prevention orders of my own, and two judges denied them, on March 17 and March 20. On March 18, between those two hearings, the original June 2020 video was finally taken down, almost five years after it was posted.

On May 21, 2025, at Keystone Market in Shelburne Falls, Catherine Hennessey came up close behind me in the store, then told the owner she felt "unsafe," and the owner escorted her outside. The market's exterior surveillance camera recorded what happened next. It shows her smiling, making an obscene gesture toward me from her vehicle, and laughing as she drove away. I later put that video in front of Judge Mazanec.

On August 25, 2025, I filed public records request SPR25/2545 for the department's records of how complaints involving me had been handled. The department took an extension. The extended deadline passed in October 2025, and as of this writing no records have been produced. On October 19, 2025, after the chief declined to check my pulse during an encounter at a gas station, a State Police LIFEPAK 15 monitor recorded my heart rate at between 130 and 230 beats per minute.

On November 22, 2025, I was on Bridge Street documenting a truck that had been parked for several days in a posted two-hour zone near Floodwater Brewing. Hennessey appeared wearing a large papier-mâché frog mask. Her December 1 affidavit would later say she wore it because she thought I might be there and did not want me to recognize her. She nevertheless stood about six feet from me for several minutes and said, "John, I hope you get the help you need." I recorded the whole encounter, fourteen minutes of it, and that video would matter three weeks later.

November 30, 2025, began that afternoon, when Hennessey drove her Prius onto the lot I rent, smiled at me, gave me the finger twice, said "fuck you," and left. At about 5:45 that evening I was standing on the public sidewalk outside Floodwater Brewing at 40 State Street in Buckland, recording. I did not go inside. A man I did not know came out of the brewery shouting profanities at me. Then Henry Batteau, whom the village calls Brook, came out, shoved me with both hands, knocked me backward onto the pavement and struck me from behind. My phone fell to the ground, still recording. Hennessey came out and struck me repeatedly in the head and face. By my account, someone held my arms from behind while she kept hitting me. I screamed for help, and people watched. I threw no punches. I broke free.

Zachary Livingston, the brewery's owner, picked up my shoe. Hennessey picked up my phone from the roadway while it was still recording, carried it about seventy-five feet to the Deerfield River and threw it in, destroying the phone and the recording on it. Then she came back and struck and kicked me again. Batteau told Livingston, "You don't understand, John has been after my family for five years." Livingston answered that Batteau still should not have pushed me. The beating sent me into atrial fibrillation, which my physician has since attributed to the sustained stress of these six years.

The investigation that followed was thin even though it produced charges. Sergeant Gilmore's probable cause report led to the charges against both of them. Livingston's written statement supporting probable cause is dated December 9, nine days after the assault. The police did not check nearby cameras, and they requested the brewery's interior footage nine days later, by which point it had been overwritten. The man who came out shouting first was never identified or interviewed.

On December 1, the morning after she beat me, Hennessey went to court and swore an affidavit against me. It described me slipping on sleet, puffing myself up in an aisle, and her frog mask. On the strength of it, Judge Mazanec issued an emergency harassment prevention order, docket 2541R00370, without notice to me, with a hearing set for December 15. At that hearing the judge reviewed the video, including the full fourteen minutes from November 22 and the Keystone Market footage, and denied the extension. From the bench, he said: "I don't believe you, Ms. Hennessey. I believe Mr. Sendelbach." He indicated that my filming on the public sidewalk was protected activity, and he tossed the paperwork onto the spot on his desk where the clerk collects it. I have sat through a great many hearings in that courtroom, and I had never seen him look as angry as he did that morning.

The Commonwealth caught up with the two of them in the spring. On April 7, 2026, both were arraigned in Greenfield District Court on charges of assault and battery, and Hennessey also on malicious destruction of property for the phone. The District Attorney's office wrote to me on April 9 that Batteau had been released on personal recognizance with orders to stay away from me and have no contact, with a pretrial conference set for May 20. In March 2026, a further petition of my own had been denied after I was instructed not to rehash prior proceedings.

On July 28, 2026, both cases came before Judge Mazanec. In two letters dated July 30, Jaime Baker of District Attorney David E. Sullivan's Victim/Witness Assistance office confirmed the dispositions. In Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey, docket 2641CR0158, the defendant "submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on the charge(s) of Assault and Battery," and the charge was continued without a finding for six months, with orders to stay fifty yards away from me and have no contact. Her charge of malicious destruction of property under $1,200 was continued generally under Chapter 276, section 87, which is a not guilty plea, for six months on the same conditions plus restitution of $429.99. In Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau, docket 2641CR0159, the defendant likewise submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery, and the case was continued without a finding for six months on the same stay-away and no-contact conditions. Both are monitored by the Greenfield District Court Probation Department.

A continuance without a finding is not a conviction, and I will not call it one. It is also not an acquittal. Each defendant admitted that the Commonwealth's evidence was enough to find them guilty of assaulting me, and the court held the finding back on conditions. If they keep those conditions for six months, the finding may never enter. If they break them, it can. On August 7, 2026, the court issued check number 11439 for $429.99, the price of the phone that went into the river with the recording still running on it. Five years after a village was told I was the danger, the Commonwealth put in writing that the two people who beat me on November 30 had admitted facts sufficient to find them guilty of it.

6. The Reckoning That Didn't Come

The dispositions should have changed how this village spoke about me, and they changed nothing; the institutions that had moved quickly against me in 2020 stayed silent once the record ran the other way. The silences had started before the docket did. In August 2025, at the ribbon-cutting for the Bridge of Flowers after its $3.2 million renovation, committee chair Annette Szpila denied the June 2020 quote in which the Recorder had her endorsing "the anti-racism spirit of the petition." The renovation itself had removed my Trolley Gate and put stock railing in its place. Around the same time, Floodwater Brewing's Instagram account posted a photograph of a cake decorated with Jim Crow–era imagery, set on the zinc bar top I had conceived and taught Zachary Livingston to build. Thirty-four people liked it before it came down after I flagged it. I do not believe Zack meant it personally; it came from the brewery's account and whoever ran it. But over the years I had brought him paperwork about what was being done to me more than once, he had done nothing with it, and the Recorder never wrote a word about the cake.

On February 10, 2026, the Recorder published my signed My Turn column, "Time to modernize, democratize, Bridge of Flowers governance," on page A6. It proposed a part-time professional steward accountable to the Fire District, open meetings, published minutes, term limits, a real way for the public to take part, and the Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis, an exact-scale steel trellis of the historic trolleys, planted with vines and grant-fundable. I received one response. None came from the committee. Three weeks later, on March 1, the same paper ran a warm feature on the tenth annual Winter HooPla in Shelburne Falls, with a photograph of Brook Batteau and Kate Hennessey at the bonfire and Hennessey described as the event's keeper of the flame since its beginning. It ran three months after the two of them beat me on State Street and five weeks before their arraignment. The paper printed the flame. It has never printed the docket.

On March 12, 2026, in Mlynick v. Town of Erving, No. 3:24-cv-30108, United States District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni allowed a false-arrest claim against Detective Tucker Jenkins to proceed and declined to grant him qualified immunity at the motion-to-dismiss stage. Jenkins is the same detective whose March 2023 report advised Hennessey to seek a protection order without recording an interview with me. Thirteen days after that ruling, the Shelburne Select Board approved a merit raise for the department. The ruling concerns a different case and is not a finding about mine; I note it because the detective and the department are the same.

On March 23, 2026, Alouette Batteau posted a song lyric about killing a man with bare hands on Instagram, captioned "this one goes out to my stalker." After his April arraignment, Brook Batteau filmed a music video inside Trinity Church, with the sanctuary's stained glass behind him. The church's April 2024 newsletter lists him as its secretary and Rev. Kate Stevens as its pastor. I do not claim the church endorsed anything. I note only that the man arraigned for assaulting me used the church as his backdrop weeks later, and that the church has never answered a word I have sent it.

In May I took the antisemitism charge back to the man who had repeated it to my face. On May 19, 2026, I published "The Statement That Should Not Have Been Necessary," setting out the accusation, the evidence against it, and the silence that followed. On May 20, I sent Professor Hoberman a formal notice, copied to Fitchburg State faculty and to the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Jewish Book Council, The Lehrhaus, Tablet magazine and the Buckland Planning Board. It said: "I am writing to formally notify you of the complete public record regarding the false accusation of antisemitism made against me in 2020 and your endorsement of that claim on a public street in June 2023." It asked him, as a scholar of Jewish American history and a member of the Planning Board, to review the material evidence rather than rely on an unsubstantiated social media claim. No one replied.

On June 13, 2026, I published an open letter to Rev. Stevens, the leadership of Trinity Church and the institutional leaders who had said nothing, and sent it to the same list, including Hoberman and the Jewish institutions. I quoted her own June 2020 words back to her: "We need to listen; we need to learn the real United States history and hear all the stories that have not been told." I told the story of the memorial bench on the Buckland hillside, and I asked the Jewish institutions directly whether a tenured professor using their community's gravest charge as a personal street weapon, without evidence, warranted no response. I titled the email "silence is violence performed by the so called religious moral authorities," because the same people who carry that slogan on their signs had chosen silence. No one replied.

On August 10, 2026, I hand-delivered formal claims under the Massachusetts Tort Claims Act to the Town of Shelburne and the Town of Buckland and obtained date-stamped receipts. The same day I sent a conflict-of-interest and recusal request concerning the chairs of both select boards, Andrew Baker of Shelburne and Joan Livingston of Buckland, the former Recorder editor, copied to the town administrators, the State Ethics Commission and the Attorney General's office. Beyond the clerks' stamps, there has been no response. That same month, while I was recording a road closure, an officer called me a "harasser," threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct, and, when I told him about my heart condition, said, "You want to play this game, I'll play this game." He mocked my camera: "One of your eight subscribers, can't wait to see your edit."

In September 2026 my Trolley Gate came home. During the renovation it had ended up in the contractor's temporary scrapyard, and Elliston Bingham, the committee's own assistant gardener, rescued it from there without knowing it was mine. He kept it for two years, and when he learned whose it was, he brought it straight to me. The committee had planned the renovation in detail, down to where each plant would be kept [quote the committee's website on plant storage], but it made no provision to preserve the art installed on the bridge.

In October 2026, when I posted about getting the gate back and asked how it had ended up in a scrapyard, the committee spoke to me in public for the first time in six years. Committee member Jorie MacLeod wrote under the heading "Speaking for the Bridge of Flowers Committee." Facebook's edit history shows three versions within nine minutes. The first said only that the committee "had been trying to find where the gate ended up" and "had wanted to return it to John, who had asked for its return." Six minutes later she added that she "personally always thought there would be some place in town for it to be displayed and feel that perhaps at the Trolley museum," and "With the feelings of rancor from John, perhaps the Trolley museum would be ideal." Three minutes after that she added that the committee "never approved of it going to a 'scrap yard' and did think it had ended up in someone's barn." I replied with the facts. She deleted her comment. An administrator of the Shelburne Falls Collective, a private Facebook group, wrote that the exchange might not be appropriate, and the next morning I was locked out of the group.

The rest of October went the same way. On October 15, I commented under the Shelburne Falls Alliance's "10 Great Reasons" monthly-donation video, asking how its steering committee was chosen and whether it had bylaws, minutes and a budget, and linking my essay; by the next morning the comment was gone. On October 16, Chad Flasinski, a member of that steering committee, removed my comment from his restaurant's page, citing "the neutrality of our business." The committee had broken its silence once, to suggest that my temperament should decide where my work belongs. Every other door stayed shut.

7. The Charge With No Evidence

The entire documented history of the accusation that I am an antisemite consists of two sentences: one typed into a Facebook thread in June 2020, and one spoken on a Buckland sidewalk in June 2023. In everything I have been able to find, in the threads, in the correspondence and in the six years since, neither of them, nor anyone else, has cited a post of mine, a statement, a message, a remark overheard and reported, an incident with a date and a place, or a witness. Janice Sorenson did not offer any of those things when she wrote that Jewish people were my "target of choice," and no one in a thread of some two hundred comments supplied one on her behalf. Michael Hoberman did not offer any when he told me I was an antisemite. In six years, no one has produced a single fact that the charge could rest on.

Look closely at what Sorenson actually wrote: "I 'unfriended' him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice. And yet something does not feel completely right about planning his full demise." The first sentence states the gravest accusation in the thread as though it were already settled, something everyone knew, needing no example. The second sentence steps back from it. By expressing a mild unease about "his full demise," she places herself as a reluctant observer rather than the person who has just added antisemitism to the list. The two sentences work together: deliver the charge, then claim distance from what it does. And she delivered it late, into threads that had already spent hundreds of comments calling me a racist, a bigot and a Klansman and telling one another to throw me off the bridge, so that a new and different charge landed as one more confirmation of a verdict the crowd had already reached. And the second sentence confirms, in her own words, what the thread around her was for.

The phrase "years ago" deserves a fact of its own. On August 15, 2013, Janice Sorenson walked into my shop at 44 State Street, still wearing her race bib from the Bridge of Flowers Classic, and sat for a portrait in my People of the Chair series, in the big steel-hooped chair that anchored it. By my own records she had already unfriended me by then. In nine years of that race passing my door, she was the only runner who ever came in. Whatever she believed in 2020 about what I had been years earlier, it did not keep her out of my studio or out of my chair.

Against two unsupported sentences stands a physical record that anyone can visit. There is the memorial bench in the hilltop cemetery in Buckland overlooking the Clesson Brook valley, which a Jewish family asked me to make from stones off their own land, and which I set in the cemetery while Amazing Grace played from the church tower. There is the sephirot, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in polished stone, that a Jewish man in this valley commissioned from me to hold his emeralds. There is the friendship of thirty-five years with a Jewish man who trusted me from the day we met in 1991 and taught me the first chords and songs I still play every time I pick up a guitar. There are the Sojourner Truth plaques I set by hand in 2002, the Black Stones of Africa in the Pothole Fountain since 2011, and the bench I built with Mohammad Yaseen, a Palestinian man whose family is sheltering in Gaza. None of this proves what is in anyone's heart, and I do not offer it that way. It shows the life the accusation was made about, and it sharpens the one question the accusers have never answered: what conduct, specifically, did they mean?

The man who repeated the charge to my face is, by profession, one of the people in this region best equipped to know what such a charge requires. Michael Hoberman has taught at Fitchburg State University since 2001 as a professor of English specializing in Jewish American history, literature and regional folklore. He is a Fulbright scholar, has published with Rutgers University Press and Oxford University Press, writes for Tablet, and sits on the Buckland Planning Board [confirm whether he co-chairs it]. He teaches Folklore in America (ENGL 3880), Storytelling and the Oral Tradition (ENGL 2890) and Culture and Literature of Place, courses that ask students to examine how local stories and rumor shape, and distort, the way communities see real people. On September 26, 2024, he gave a public lecture at the Sunderland Public Library titled "Only In America: Anti-Semitism."

In a February 27, 2026 interview with the University of Pennsylvania's Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, Hoberman described his scholarly focus as "how people shape their cultural lives and sense of collective meaning through their relationships to the physical geography that surrounds them." In that same interview, as I read it, he cautioned against reducing complex human encounters to a single flat accusation of bigotry, saying that doing so is "just not particularly interesting. It would be one more story we've all heard before too many times." [Confirm the context of this quote in the interview before publishing.] I do not quarrel with any of that. I only ask that the same standard apply to his own conduct on Conway Street, where a man whose work is reading identity in the physical landscape repeated an unsupported comment from a Facebook thread to the face of a man he had never met, without asking a single question about the thirty-five years of work that man had put into the landscape around him. I do not know whether he knew about the memorial bench, and it does not matter. The point is that he never looked.

I put all of this in front of the people whose responsibility it is to protect the meaning of that charge, and none of them answered. On May 20, 2026, I sent a formal notice to Hoberman and to Fitchburg State faculty, with copies to the Katz Center at Penn, the Jewish Book Council, The Lehrhaus, Tablet and the Buckland Planning Board. On June 13, I sent my open letter to the same list. I had already written to Fitchburg State, including its general counsel. Not one of them replied, not to dispute the record, not to defend him, not to ask a question. When a charge this serious is used without evidence by someone with standing to know better, and the institutions that exist to guard its meaning stay silent, the cost is not only mine. Every unsupported use of the word antisemite makes it easier for the next real case to be waved away.

The charge of racism against Black people, which the petition and the threads made first and loudest, rests on no more. The petition's case was that I had interrupted a moment of silence, that I had been hostile, that I smiled, and that I had said "police lives matter most." I was not smiling; my face sits that way, and I was squinting into the sun. I did say "police lives matter most," and I said it as sarcasm, aimed at Shelburne Police Chief James Hicks, who was standing about fifteen feet away, watching. A jab at a police chief is not a statement about Black lives, and the petition read it as one only by lifting it out of the moment in which it was said. The Recorder described the thirteen-minute exchange as one in which I "objected to remaining silent and expressed [my] issues with certain aspects of the Black Lives Matter organization." Even taken entirely at its word, that describes a man disagreeing with an organization and with how a protest was being conducted on a public crossing, in a pandemic, without notice. Disagreeing with an organization is not hatred of a people, and no one in six years has produced a racist statement of mine. Against the label stand the Sojourner Truth plaques I set by hand in 2002 and the Black Stones of Africa I approved for the Pothole Fountain in 2011, nine years before anyone called me a racist, the very stones beside which the committee hung its anti-racism sign without a word about them. Against it stands the bench I built with Mohammad Yaseen. And against it stands the woman who wrote the petition, who, after she and I later talked it through, posted that I had been "actually very kind and understanding."

The accusation of antisemitism is either supported by evidence or it is not. This one is not. It never was. It joined the other labels attached to me in those threads, KKK member, child predator, woman harasser, racist, each one delivered without a fact behind it. But it is the one that came back in person three years later from a credentialed scholar, and it is the one that every institution I asked has chosen to leave standing. That is why it is at the center of this account, and why it is the first thing I am asking to have corrected.

8. What the Record Shows

Stripped of every adjective, the documents tell one story: where a neutral decision-maker examined a specific accusation against me, the decisions I have described here went my way, and the institutions that could have corrected the public record did not. The table below lists only what exists on paper, in order.

Date	Document or record	What it shows
Aug 26, 2019	Joanne Soroka email	"you don't know who you are fucking with… it will get ugly"; reported to police, no action
June 2020	Facebook thread, Janice Sorenson	"Jewish people were his target of choice"; no incident cited
June 13, 2020	Recorder, "Artist's work in question following petition"	Front-page story on a petition Change.org had removed the day before; same edition's editor column: "We also correct them"; no correction ever printed
June 18, 2020	Recorder, "Bridge of Flowers Committee installs anti-racism memorial"	Sign placed beside the Black Stones without acknowledging them; no contact with me
July 13, 2021	Police report 21BUC-54-OF	Hennessey advised to seek a harassment order; no interview with me recorded
Mar 2, 2023	Police report 23SHL-8-AR	Eight incidents taken from Hennessey; order advised; no interview with me recorded
June 6, 2023	Clerk-magistrate, docket 2341AC000088	No probable cause on the criminal harassment complaint
2023	Judge Mazanec	Harassment prevention order vacated after audio review
June 14, 2023	My police report, Sgt. Budrewicz	Hoberman: "You are an antisemite"; no response to report or demand letter
Sept 7, 2024	Brad Walker letter	Refuses eviction; no criminal or civil judgments against me; offers mediation
Aug 25, 2025	Records request SPR25/2545	Deadline passed October 2025; nothing produced
Nov 30, 2025	Assault outside Floodwater Brewing	Probable cause found against both attackers
Dec 15, 2025	Judge Mazanec, docket 2541R00370	Extension denied after video review
Feb 10, 2026	Recorder My Turn, page A6	Governance reforms proposed; no response from the committee
Mar 12, 2026	Mlynick v. Town of Erving, No. 3:24-cv-30108	False-arrest claim against Det. Jenkins proceeds; qualified immunity denied at this stage
May 20, 2026	Formal notice to Hoberman and institutions	No reply from anyone
June 13, 2026	Open letter to Rev. Stevens and institutions	No reply from anyone
July 28, 2026	DA letters, dockets 2641CR0158 and 2641CR0159	Both defendants admit facts sufficient on assault and battery; continued without a finding; $429.99 restitution
Aug 7, 2026	Court check no. 11439	$429.99 for the phone
Aug 10, 2026	Tort Claims Act claims and recusal request	Date-stamped receipts; no substantive response
Oct 2026	MacLeod comment, edit history	Committee's first public word in six years; deleted after my reply

The neutral parties are easy to list, because there are only a few and they all point the same way. A clerk-magistrate found no probable cause. A district court judge vacated one order after hearing the audio, denied another after watching the video, and said from the bench that he believed me. A landlord with every commercial reason to make a problem go away looked at the accusations and wrote that no court had ever found against me. The District Attorney's office charged both of the people who beat me, and both admitted facts sufficient for a guilty finding. In an unrelated case, a federal judge allowed a false-arrest claim to proceed against the detective whose report had advised a protection order against me without hearing from me; that ruling is not a finding about my case, but it concerns the same detective. Not every ruling went my way. A court granted Hennessey's 2023 order the day after the police advised it, and judges denied my own petitions in March 2025 and March 2026. I do not treat those as verdicts on the whole six years, and I do not treat the favorable rulings that way either. Each decided the question in front of it.

The institutions are easy to list too, and they all point the same way as well. The Recorder promised in print to correct its mistakes and never corrected this one. The Bridge of Flowers Committee met about me without me, never answered my published proposal, and spoke once in six years to suggest that my temperament should decide where my work belongs. The police acted on one side's complaints without interviewing me, sent my own complaints elsewhere, and have not produced the records I requested. The select boards stamped my claims and said nothing. Fitchburg State, the Katz Center, the Jewish Book Council, The Lehrhaus, Tablet and Trinity Church received the record and did not reply. The Shelburne Falls Alliance deleted the questions I asked about its governance.

I have come to call this pattern the Cold Cruel Sidestep, and its last stage Distributed Maintenance. It does not require coordination, shared motive or anyone's bad faith, and I do not claim to know what any single recipient of my letters thought. It describes effects that can be observed. An allegation enters public circulation. Institutions reproduce it or leave it uncorrected. Later evidence, a dismissal, a ruling, a docket, receives a fraction of the attention the allegation did. And the original story goes on shaping how people see you. Each institution can explain its own inaction on its own terms, the email it did not answer, the correction it did not run, the comment it removed, without ever having to account for the cumulative result. The narrative holds because no one is responsible for letting it go.

9. What Correction Looks Like

I am not asking for a dramatic gesture or anyone's ruin; I am asking for specific corrections, each one small, each one owed, and each one possible tomorrow. The first two concern the charge at the center of this account. Janice Sorenson can publicly withdraw her statement that Jewish people were my "target of choice," in the same public space where she made it. Michael Hoberman can publicly withdraw what he said to me on Conway Street on June 14, 2023. Neither of them has ever offered a fact in support of those words, and withdrawing words that have no facts behind them costs nothing but pride. Fitchburg State University and the Jewish institutions I wrote to can do the simplest thing of all, which is to read the record and say whether they consider an unsupported accusation of antisemitism, repeated by a scholar of the subject, acceptable. If they do, they can say so. If they do not, they can say that instead.

The Greenfield Recorder can meet the standard its editor-in-chief set out on its own pages on June 13, 2020, in the same edition that put me on the front page: own up to its mistakes and correct them. That means a correction of the June 2020 coverage, and it means reporting the July 28, 2026 dispositions with the same prominence it gave the petition. A paper that put my name and my bench on its front page over a petition can put the Commonwealth's findings in the same place.

The Bridge of Flowers Committee can answer the proposal I published on February 10, 2026. The Shelburne Falls Fire District, which owns the bridge, can open a public process on how the bridge is governed, with open meetings, published minutes, term limits, a professional steward accountable to the District, and a way for every resident, not only members of a private women's club, to take part. That process can also decide, on the merits of the object and in public, where my Trolley Gate belongs. The Shelburne Falls Alliance, which is asking residents for monthly donations, can publish how its steering committee was chosen, its bylaws, its minutes and its budget, and stop deleting the questions.

The petition I opened in October 2026 asks the state's oversight bodies for the rest. It asks the Attorney General for an independent review of how complaints involving me were handled from 2020 through 2025, including Reports 21BUC-54-OF and 23SHL-8-AR, the November 30, 2025 investigation, and the unanswered records request SPR25/2545, with a public report and recommendations. It asks the Massachusetts POST Commission to review the department's practices. It asks the Shelburne and Buckland select boards to account publicly for the review they conducted before retaining Detective Jenkins and approving the 2026 merit raise, and for their oversight under the shared-services agreement. And it asks for three written department policies that would protect anyone in my position: that both parties to an ongoing dispute be heard before a complaint is acted on, that available camera footage be identified and preserved within twenty-four hours of an assault, and that officers not advise parties in an open criminal investigation to seek protection orders before that investigation is complete.

None of these requests requires anyone to like me. They require only that the standards these people and institutions publish, about listening, about evidence, about correcting mistakes, about silence and what it does, be applied to this story as they would be to any other.

The bench is still on its hill in Buckland, looking out over the Clesson Brook valley, where a Jewish family asked me to put it. The Black Stones of Africa are still in the fountain at the end of the bridge. The gate is back in my hands. The dockets are filed, the letters are signed, and the record is complete and public at johnsendelbach.com, with no login and no fee. For six years I have been waiting for someone in a position to correct what was said about me to ask me a single question. The record is here. The question is still open.