Retired Long-Time Pennsylvania Prosecutor James Martin Dies – the Person Most Responsible for Wrestler Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka Getting Away with Murder in 1983
August 18, 2026by Irvin Muchnick
This is a footnote to the recent post intended as an antidote to the gushing obituary in the Allentown Morning Call following the death of James Martin, Lehigh County’s district attorney from 1998 to 2023. (See “Retired Long-Time Pennsylvania Prosecutor James Martin Dies – the Person Most Responsible for Wrestler Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka Getting Away with Murder in 1983,” https://concussioninc.net/?p=16785.)
I provided an accurate alternative history of the botching of the prosecution of WWE’s Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, who clearly committed (at minimum) manslaughter in the 1983 death, in a local motel room, of his girlfriend Nancy Argentino. And I noted that the Morning Call, characteristically, also had fudged its coverage of the DA’s unrelated but equally outrageous defamation suit against local blogger-critic Bill Villa. This was a classic “SLAPP,” or strategic lawsuit against public participation – frivolous litigation by a rich or powerful plaintiff (in this case, a public official), designed only to harass and to chill First Amendment rights.
I said the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was among the states without an anti-SLAPP statute – but that detail, I just found out, was wrong. Pennsylvania did, in fact, enact SLAPP legislation in 2024, the year after Martin’s retirement. The statute, Act 72, provides for SLAPP victims to file counter-claims and gain sanctions against abusive plaintiffs.
First Amendment advocates hailed this breakthrough. Regional media coverage, however, was sparse. In Martin’s Lehigh Valley, it was nonexistent. The Allentown Morning Call has yet to clue in its readers, even though the newspaper had run a 2019 overview piece of the SLAPP issue first published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which included a reference to Martin’s legal harassment of Villa. That case settled in 2022. (Staying on corrupt message, the Morning Call failed to seek comment from Villa for its story on the tepid denouement of Martin v. Villa. I’m persuaded by Villa’s well backed-up opinion that the settlement was essentially a surrender by Martin, but only after seven years of serious financial and other cost to the victim-defendant.)
As for the ’19 piece by the Inquirer’s David Gambacorta, I remarked at the time that “the bark of the headline … is a lot stronger than the bite of its survey of the [SLAPP] landscape.” (See “Philadelphia Inquirer Finally Breaks the Embargo on Coverage of Lehigh County District Attorney James Martin’s ‘SLAPP’ Suit Against a Citizen-Journalist Critic,” June 5, 2019, https://concussioninc.net/?p=13886.)
Turning to the nearly stealth circulation of news of Act 72, I see that the usual suspects put more energy into patting themselves on the back for being do-gooders than writing anything about actual people who were affected. This was odd behavior for a class of people – journalists – whose job is defined by spreading the word. Try to imagine the signing of a major civil rights bill without an invitation or a news reference to figures who were heretofore denied voting access or endured discrimination. Or a tough new drunk-driving law without acknowledging the families that lost loved ones on the roads.
Again: Bill Villa had to fend off DA Martin’s bogus defamation suit for seven years.
Bill told me he reached out to one other SLAPP victim who had been cited in the Inquirer story. That person didn’t know about Act 72 in real time, either. It’s fair to speculate that no one with actual historical SLAPP experience was notified.
But hand it to the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, which did gather itself to create an award honoring State Representative Ryan Bizzarro and attorney Michael Berry for their catalyzing roles in the passage of Act 72 and its signing by Governor Josh Shapiro.
When Villa complained to the NewsMedia Association, Melissa Bevan Melewsky, who has the title of media law counsel, cleared her throat by explaining that it was “a busy time” for her group, then wrote:
“As I’m sure you know, most bills do not get a formal signing with the governor, and while this bill was a rare exception, only a few hours’ notice was provided to anti-SLAPP coalition organizations. Members of the public were not present, but journalists were and news coverage resulted at the time. The anti-SLAPP bill and several others were signed during a very brief window with the governor.
In addition to news coverage, members of the coalition publicly applauded the bill’s passage in 2024, and PNA funded an advertising campaign published by news organizations across the commonwealth thanking lawmakers, the governor and others involved in its passage.
It is also important to note that the coalition is still working to get the law fully implemented, as its procedural provisions require formal action by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and coalition members continue track, analyze and weigh in on proposed legislation to prevent subsequent bills from chipping away at the rights enshrined in the law. That work will continue for the foreseeable future.”