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Heather Donahue, the retired actor of “The Blair Witch Project” fame and current Freedom Select Board candidate, was issued a trespass notice from the Maine State Police two years ago instructing her to stay off her neighbor’s property.
The neighbor, Richard Bickford, alleges that she was “harassing” workers on his land.
Donahue denies the allegations.
“I’m getting very weary of the lies that are being told about me. It’s actually astonishing what people have made up about me,” Donahue said Wednesday. “The more I participate in local government, the more these folks come out of the woodwork. And the more I actually get done for the town, the more aggressive these folks become.”
The episode has been getting renewed public attention because, after previously serving on the board and then getting recalled from office last year, Donahue is running again for an elected board seat. And it is another example — along with an incident in which she spray-painted roadside trees as part of an ongoing dispute over public access to a local road — in which Donahue has come under fire for crossing boundaries that critics say exceeded her authority as an elected official.
This municipal election is Friday. Voting is at the election hall next to the Freedom town office from 8 a.m to 8 p.m.
Donahue was a member of the town’s Select Board in April 2024, when Bickford filed a trespassing complaint against her with the state police. The Bangor Daily News obtained a redacted copy of the state police report.
“They really do not want me back in office because I stand up for everybody’s rights and not just a single group of people who’ve been running things in this town for a long time,” Donahue said.
In spring 2024, Bickford was building a house in Freedom on land that abuts Donahue’s property. According to the state police report, Bickford said Donahue “came down and was harassing the construction crew that was there working and taking photographs stating that she is on the Town Council and has the right to be there.”
Donahue said the interaction with Bickford’s contractor was “brief and cordial” and that Bickford’s account appears to combine two separate incidents that occurred weeks apart.
Bickford’s crew had been jackhammering on a ledge that sits above an aquifer that supplies water to nearby homes, Donahue said. She went onto Bickford’s property to document where the ledge was being split.
Police contacted another Select Board member, Ryan Willett, who said Donahue was “not acting on behalf of the town,” according to the report.
Donahue disagrees, saying, “I did so in my capacity as the Select Board representative for the neighborhood.”
Freedom voters recalled Donahue last year after she used spray paint to mark trees on Beaver Ridge Road, which the town has asserted is a public road. Donahue, who lives on the road, has said that she was surveying it in her role as an elected official.
Critics argued that Donahue exceeded her authority when she marked the trees.
After Donahue’s run-in with Bickford, his lawyer contacted the police to ask if they were going to charge Donahue with threatening, the police report shows. The officer told him that the incident “did not meet any elements for the crime,” according to the report.
Bickford gave a detailed description of the incident during a public hearing before the recall vote last year, according to the Midcoast Villager, but some of the details he gave — such as how Donahue was dangerously swinging a machete — were not borne out by the police report.
