A North Carolina jury ordered NASCAR driver Jennifer Jo Cobb to pay $850K after finding she broke up a 17-year marriage, the wife calls it vindication.

Tracey Hughes left a Davidson County courtroom with more than a moral win. A jury sided with her on Sept. 24 and ordered truck-series driver Jennifer Jo Cobb to pay $850,002 after Hughes claimed Cobb helped destroy her marriage.

The New York Post reported the split: $50,000 for alienation of affection and $800,000 for criminal conversation, plus $1 in punitive damages on each claim. Hughes had sued in 2024 and sought more than $25,000 on each count, including punitive damages.

She says the dollar figure was never the main point.

“It’s more important, I think, to be vindicated. The money figure was, I think, just a statement maybe by the jury,” Hughes said.

Hughes says the case gave her power back

Hughes described a 17-year marriage to Clayton Odie Hughes that she says began to fall apart around January 2021. She alleged an affair with Cobb that stretched across several months and left her life in pieces.

“I felt like my whole world had just blown up,” she told WFMY after the verdict.

Her husband was not a stranger to Cobb’s world. Reporting cited in coverage identified Clayton Odie Hughes as a longtime spotter for Jennifer Jo Cobb Racing, the same team the driver ran under when she last competed in a 2024 Truck Series race in Kansas City and finished 31st.

That workplace tie sits at the center of the claim. Hughes alleged Cobb willfully seduced, enticed, and alienated her husband’s affections, including texting to set up sexual meet-ups. The jury’s award treated those claims as proven under North Carolina civil law.

Hughes did not frame the suit as a payday. She framed it as a line she finally drew.

“The lawsuit gave me power. It empowered me, it gave me focus. It gave me a job to do and stand up for myself,”

she said.

She also said the public glare went further than she expected. “Your most private parts of your life are out there. I thought it would stop at the courtroom, but it’s gone a little bit more into the press.”

North Carolina still lets wronged spouses take a third party to court

Most states buried these claims decades ago. North Carolina did not.

Alienation of affection and criminal conversation remain live common-law torts there. Criminal conversation is the civil label for adultery. Alienation of affection covers wrongful acts by a third party that diminish one spouse’s affection for the other.

Hughes’ attorney, John Vermitsky, put the second claim in plain terms for reporters.

“Alienation of affection is any wrongful act that a third party does to diminish the feelings of affection of one spouse for another, and it actually doesn’t require sex,”

Vermitsky said.

That matters. The law does not treat marriage as a private arrangement no outsider can touch. In North Carolina, a jury can still decide a third party helped pull a husband or wife away, and attach a price to it.

The Davidson County panel did exactly that. It put the heavier weight on the adultery claim and a smaller sum on the affection claim, then added a token $2 in punitive damages. The message was less about pocket change and more about responsibility.

Cobb says the judgment is not final

Cobb, 53, built a two-decade racing résumé across NASCAR’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and Truck Series, with 256 starts. Coverage identified her last race as that 2024 Kansas City Truck Series event for her own team.

She has not treated the jury’s decision as the last word. As reported through WFMY, Cobb said final judgment has not been entered and post-trial motions are ongoing. She sought to separate the jury’s award from any binding court order still to come.

No final judgment entry appears in the available reporting. No statement from Clayton Odie Hughes appears either. The courtroom fight, for now, sits between the verdict Hughes won and the motions Cobb says remain open.

Hughes filed knowing the case would drag private pain into public view. She says she did it anyway because standing still left her with nothing.

Marriage vows still mean something in a North Carolina jury box, and this one put a hard number on what happens when someone else helps break them.