Former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema admitted to a sexual affair with her married bodyguard and is now fighting a lawsuit built on a legal doctrine that dates back to 1745, one that most states abandoned decades ago.
Heather Ammel, the ex-wife of Sinema's former security guard Matthew Ammel, filed an alienation of affection lawsuit against the former Arizona senator in North Carolina, one of just six states that still allow a spouse to sue a third party for helping destroy a marriage. The case has moved to federal court, where Sinema's legal team is pushing to throw it out on jurisdictional grounds. An evidentiary hearing is set for August 19.
The core of Sinema's defense is geography, not denial. She has acknowledged the affair. She has acknowledged the sex. Her attorneys argue that none of it happened in North Carolina, and that the state therefore has no business hearing the case. But the facts Heather Ammel has put on the record paint a picture of a relationship that stretched across multiple states and months, and the law she invoked does not require the affair to have taken place inside state lines to establish a claim.
In deposition testimony, Sinema described the first sexual encounter with Matthew Ammel. As legal analyst Jonathan Turley detailed, Sinema testified plainly:
"We were staying at an Airbnb in Napa, California. We were outside. Matt kissed me. We went inside and had sex."
That encounter took place at the home of Sinema's friends Penny and Grant Croissant. But it was not the only one. Sinema detailed having sex with Matthew Ammel at the June 2024 wedding of CNN anchor Jessica Dean in New York City, at Sinema's apartment in Washington, D.C., and in Arizona and Colorado. The Washington Examiner reported that the relationship began in May 2024, while Matthew Ammel was still married.
Text messages entered into evidence show the relationship went well beyond a physical encounter. Sinema wrote to Matthew Ammel: "Putting my hand on your heart. I'll see you soon. I miss you." Another message read: "I hope your day was okay. Thinking of you. I am with you. I keep waking up during my sleep and reaching over for your arms to hold me."
Heather Ammel discovered the affair after her husband came home intoxicated and she found one of Sinema's messages on his phone. She later described Sinema in written communications as "insidious" and "a woman who is willing to break up a family."
The couple separated on November 1, 2024. They divorced in March 2026. They have multiple children together.
AP News reported that Matthew Ammel was hired as part of Sinema's security detail after retiring from the Army in 2022. He accompanied her on travels to Napa Valley, Las Vegas, and Saudi Arabia. Heather Ammel's lawsuit alleges that before Sinema's involvement, the Ammels had "a good and loving marriage" with "genuine love and affection."
The lawsuit also alleges that Sinema paid for psychedelic treatment for Matthew Ammel, who struggled with PTSD, substance abuse, and traumatic brain injuries from military deployments. The relationship between a sitting senator and a member of her own protective detail raises its own questions about power dynamics, questions the lawsuit does not need to answer but that any honest observer would ask.
Sinema allegedly sent "romantic and lascivious" messages through the encrypted app Signal, gave Matthew Ammel gifts, invited him on trips, and, according to the complaint filed in Moore County Superior Court in North Carolina, suggested he bring MDMA on a work trip.
Sinema's attorney, Steven Epstein, has argued that the case should be dismissed because none of the conduct connecting Sinema to Matthew Ammel occurred in North Carolina. In a filing, Epstein wrote that "Defendant's conduct related to her romantic relationship with Mr. Ammel does not connect her to North Carolina in a meaningful way" and that "jurisdiction over her in this action does not comport with due process."
The argument amounts to this: the sex happened in California, New York, Washington, Arizona, and Colorado, not North Carolina. And by the time any romantic communication may have reached Matthew Ammel in the state, the marriage was already effectively over.
That is a factual claim the August 19 evidentiary hearing will test. Alienation of affection is a tort about the destruction of a marriage, not about where specific physical acts took place. If the court finds that Sinema's conduct, wherever it occurred, caused the loss of affection that Heather Ammel experienced in North Carolina, the jurisdictional defense could collapse.
Alienation of affection is one of the oldest causes of action in Anglo-American law. Turley traces it to the 1745 English case Winsmore v. Greenbank, in which a court found a paramour liable for "maliciously and wickedly intending to injure the plaintiff" by having "persuaded procured and enticed the said wife," thereby denying the husband his "exclusive and legally enforceable right to his wife's service."
The tort originally treated a wife's companionship and labor as a property right belonging to the husband. A related claim, enticement, "involved assisting or inducing a wife to leave her husband by means of fraud, violence, or persuasion." Both doctrines reflected a legal world in which marriage was an economic arrangement and a spouse's fidelity was an enforceable contract term.
Forty-two states have abolished the tort. Only Hawaii, North Carolina, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Utah still allow it. Critics have called these suits "heart balm" claims, a phrase that dates back at least to a 1956 New Jersey case, Magierowski v. Buckley, in which the court warned that such lawsuits had become "devices for extracting large sums of money without proper justification" and "a fruitful source of coercion, extortion and blackmail."
The New Jersey court added that "even genuine actions are brought more frequently than not, with purely mercenary or vindictive motives" and that "no preventative purpose is served, since such torts seldom are committed with deliberate plan."
Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and Fox News contributor, notes that the Supreme Court has never found alienation of affection torts unconstitutional, even after Obergefell v. Hodges expanded the constitutional definition of marriage. The tort survives because no federal court has struck it down, and the states that keep it on the books see no reason to let it go.
The New York Post reported that some North Carolina alienation of affection verdicts have reached into the millions of dollars. Heather Ammel's lawsuit seeks at least $75,000 in damages. North Carolina family attorney Charles R. Ullman, who has explained how these cases work in practice, said the tort endures because "it's one of the few ways that people feel like they get some type of relief."
UVA sociologist Brad Wilcox offered a sharper framing of why the law still resonates: "This idea that infidelity is just some private little matter between two consenting adults is simply not true. It can exact devastating emotional and financial costs on adults and on children."
That argument cuts directly against Sinema's implicit position, that the affair is a private matter between consenting adults and that the legal system has no business adjudicating its consequences. Heather Ammel and her children are the ones who lived with those consequences. The tort exists precisely because someone has to answer for that.
Sinema left the Senate as a Democrat-turned-independent who built a brand on defying political convention. She is now the defendant in a lawsuit that tests whether an 18th-century legal doctrine can hold a powerful public figure accountable for conduct that most Americans would call straightforwardly wrong, sleeping with a married employee, even if most states no longer let courts punish it.
The jurisdictional fight will determine whether the case proceeds at all. If it does, Sinema will face a jury in a state that still believes marriage is worth protecting in court, and that the people who help destroy one should pay a price for it.
Forty-two states decided the legal system should stay out of the bedroom. North Carolina decided the bedroom is not where the damage lands. Heather Ammel and her children can tell you which state got it right.
