Child abuse trial begins for Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small

MAYS LANDING. Pa. — Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small Sr., facing child abuse charges for allegedly assaulting his daughter, appeared in a New Jersey courtroom Monday as opening statements in his trial got underway.

Small, a Democrat who was reelected mayor this year, faces charges of child endangerment, aggravated assault, and witness tampering. He has denied any wrongdoing.

The allegations stem from incidents in 2023 and 2024 in which prosecutors say Small and his wife abused their teenage daughter, largely over their disapproval of her relationship with her boyfriend. In one instance, prosecutors said, Small struck the girl multiple times with a broom, leaving her unconscious.

Prosecutors further say he punched the girl repeatedly in the legs and, in another outburst, grabbed her head, threw her to the ground, and threatened to throw her down the stairs.

Small glared at prosecutors Monday as they began to make their case to the jury, telling the panel that “violence is never a solution” and “abuse is not parenting.”

Assistant Prosecutor Elizabeth Fischer said jurors should expect to hear from Small’s daughter on the witness stand in coming days.

“This was a time in her life when she needed the full support of her parents,“ Fischer said. ”This child got none of that. This child was met with violence."

Small’s defense attorney, Louis Barbone, insisted that his client had done nothing wrong.

He told jurors that Small’s daughter had lied to investigators and said that the alleged incident with the broom “did not happen.”

He faulted prosecutors for portraying Small as an “ogre” of a father and said the atmosphere in the Small household was not abusive, but rather the result of attentive parents who had attempted to intervene in the wayward course of their daughter’s life.

“This isn’t about an election; it’s not about the city of Atlantic City,” Barbone said, rebuffing prosecutors’ suggestions that the girl was intimidated by her father’s power when debating whether to report his actions. “[Small] would give up his elected office in a moment to have his daughter back.”

Amid his legal struggles, Small has vowed not to cede his position, even as New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a fellow Democrat, suggested that he consider stepping away from office.

In August, Small rejected an offer from prosecutors in which he would plead guilty to a third-degree assault charge and avoid jail time. The deal would have also required him to forfeit the mayorship, and when asked whether he would consider it, Small said “absolutely not.”

The trial before Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Levin began after a week of proceedings including jury selection and pretrial motions on what evidence the panel would hear.

Prosecutors said Small’s daughter, who is now 17, would recount “the most difficult thing of her entire life” before a courtroom that, in addition to Small, included her mother, La’Quetta Small, in the gallery.

La’Quetta Small faces charges of endangering the welfare of a child and disorderly persons simple assault in a pending trial, and is the superintendent of Atlantic City Public Schools.

Fischer, the prosecutor, went over some of Small’s alleged threats, including that he was going to “earth slam her down the stairs” and “throw her off a second-floor balcony.”

When his daughter threatened to tell adults at her school, Small allegedly told her to “go ahead and tell them,” according to Fischer, suggesting that nothing would be done to him.

Small’s daughter eventually made a report with her school guidance office. Jordan Rivera, a school counselor, testified Monday to a note she wrote on an evaluation card after a mental health presentation that read: ”At one time I was abused and I want and need someone to talk to because I have a lot going on.“

Meanwhile, as investigators got involved, prosecutors say Small lied about the teen’s injuries and told his daughter to “twist up” her account of the assaults as they questioned her.

He asked her to say she tripped and fell in her room, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest on the witness-tampering charge, which prosecutors added to his case last fall.

Small and his wife were charged in April 2024. Barbone, Small’s attorney, said at the time that the charges were “politically motivated.”

During Monday’s proceedings, Barbone disputed the broom story, saying Small and the girl had been fighting over the broom after his daughter produced a butter knife and that she fell and hit her head during the struggle.

He delved into his client’s deteriorating relationship with his daughter, telling jurors that for most of her life Small and the girl had been “best friends,” and that the mayor and his wife had always held a “vision, a wish” for her to grow up successful.

Barbone presented jurors with a large graphic of an arrow meant to represent the timeline of Small’s relationship with his daughter.

Between the years 2008 to 2023, it read: “DAD WAS [DAUGHTER’S] BEST FRIEND FOR 15 YEARS.”

In Barbone’s telling, the relationship quickly deteriorated when the girl, then 15, brought home a new boyfriend two years her senior.

“Everything collapses,” Barbone said, telling jurors that the young couple were suddenly in constant communication, to the detriment of her familial relationships. To prove his point, he showed jurors sexually explicit text messages between the girl and her boyfriend, apologizing before reading some of them aloud.

In one message, the girl references the possibility of getting pregnant.

“The last thing you want to see is your child going down the tubes,” the lawyer told the jury.

Only hours before, prosecutors unsuccessfully fought to exclude the messages from evidence, saying they contained “things of intimate character that anyone is going to expect between teenagers.”

Barbone later played videos recorded in the Small household in May 2024 — months after the alleged abuse — in which the girl could be heard shrieking and crying after her father took her phone away. That move had caused her to behave like “an animal,” Barbone said.

She could be seen hitting Small in the video, and he did not strike back.

But prosecutors told jurors that they would hear evidence of incidents of a different magnitude.

They mentioned an incident when La’Quetta Small had been “wailing on her daughter” for not cleaning the kitchen. Fischer said the girl’s father, instead of coming to her aid, repeatedly told her to “shut up.”

Jurors will also hear a voicemail from Small to his wife in which he says “you better come get your daughter or I’m gonna do something that puts me in jail,” the prosecutor said.

In Fischer’s assessment, the teen had been crying out for help. Instead, the prosecutor said, she received “pain and manipulation.”