He noted that Sinema sent Ammel nine messages through the encrypted Signal app while he was physically at his family home in Whispering Pines, North Carolina, and that her testimony denying knowledge of his location was not credible. In other words, Sinema lied to the court. Those messages showed Sinema “invading the marriage not just while he was away on trips with her” but also while Ammel was home with his family.
Bad luck for Cin…sorry, Sinema. North Carolina is one of only six states where the alienation of affection tort remains on the books, allowing a spouse to seek damages from a third party whose malicious conduct destroys a marriage. I bet she didn’t know that.
The judge concluded 1) that because the relationship included sex, malice was conclusively presumed, 2) that plaintiff Heather Ammel was injured at her marital residence, and 3) that the constitutional test for personal jurisdiction over an out-of-state defendant was therefor met. Heather Ammel sued in state court in September 2025 seeking at least $75,000 in damages.
Phone records showed Matthew Ammel to be in North Carolina more than 60% of the year the affair developed, the order says.
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh has a fascinating post about the alienation of affections tort. He writes in part,
“In the discussion of the Kyrsten Sinema alienation of affections case, several commenters took roughly the following view: Spouses have promised fidelity to each other, and if they break those promises, they are at fault towards the other spouse. But one spouse’s lover hasn’t made any promises to the other spouse. The lover therefore can’t be said to be at fault.
“I don’t think that view is right, and I don’t think it fits the norm for how our legal system treats analogous scenarios. I think that on balance the abolition of the alienation of affections tort (which has happened in 45 states) is a good idea. But not for the reason that “the lover isn’t at fault, only the spouses are…Rather, alienation of affections is analogous to complicity liability. If Alan commits an intentional wrong against Betty, either a crime or a tort, and Cathy encourages Alan to do that, Cathy is generally liable. The term sometimes used for this is “solicitation,” though sometimes it’s seen as a form of aiding and abetting.
“If Cathy helps Alan in committing the wrong, or participates in committing it, Cathy is likewise liable for aiding and abetting or conspiracy. (Both those concepts apply to civil liability as well as criminal liability.)
“Perhaps most analogously to alienation of affections, if Alan breaches his contract with Betty, and Cathy encouraged him to breach it, she will in many situations be liable for intentional interference with contract. Likewise if Alan breached a fiduciary duty to Betty, and Cathy encouraged that breach….
Additional ethics notes:
1. Sinema works as an attorney at Hogan Lovells and teaches at Arizona State University. A judge just ruled that she lied in her court documents (or that her attorney lied on her behalf). She should be disciplined for that by the Arizona Bar, suspended at least. She won’t be, of course.
2. Interestingly, Sinema’s teaching gig isn’t at the law school. She is the Distinguished Professor of Practice in the School of Social Work. Nonetheless, universities shouldn’t have proven liars on their faculties. But “Everybody Does it”….
3. Did then-Senator Sinema used her imbalance of power to entice a subordinate into a non-consensual sexual relationship, as recently discussed in this recent EA post? Does the “boss-subordinate” sexual harassment/hostile work environment only apply when the boss is a man?
______________
Pointer: Young Bill.
Ethics Alarms 
She’s a piece of work. Her wiki page makes for interesting reading. I have to wonder what benefit she provides to a mega-firm.
In my experience, the destruction of marraige does nto merely come from within the mariage. It is often facilitated by forces outside the arital domain. Our present societal norms, at large in particular, is culpable. Marriage is disrepected in the cinema, the media, in politics and legislation.
75 k is not enough compensation, more should be extracted from both the paramour and the exhusband for the destruction of the family, which was and ought not be the bedrock of society.
The amount of damages will be determined during the trial. $75,000 is most likely just a nominal sum included in the complaint to get things rolling.
In an affair like this both participants are to blame. We cannot redirect the blame to society, as liberals like to do (Hey Officer Krupke, I am depraved on account of being deprived), and we cannot absolve the bodyguard using the theory (or the legal fiction propagated by sexual harassment law) that the sexual relation was without his consent. His wife surely did not judge it that way, as she sought it fit to divorce him for his unfaithfulness. A divorce will hurt him much more financially than Kyrsten Sinema ever could. He should have followed his big head instead of being led by his little head.
Marriage is not the bedrock of society anymore like it was in the nineteen fifties, prior to Ronald Reagan as Governor of California signing into law no-fault divorce. Divorce was a scandal back in the day. Now it has become socially acceptable, up to celebrations of a divorce. I am glad that North Carolina still has laws on the book that shows some respect to the institution of marriage.
What happens if we reverse the roles? What if it is a male senator and a female employee? Do we hold the female employee as accountable as we are holding the male bodyguard, or are women less capable of controlling their emotions and not responsible for their actions?
This led to an interesting turn of events at UNC-Chapel Hill. It turns out that English professors across the country had a newslist of female students willing to have sex with professors. The professors would even write letters of recommendation (to grad school, etc) for such students to other members of the newslist based on ‘performance’. They also awarded student scholarships similarly. Well, a new Chancellor, Michael Hooker (a boon to the headline writers of the student newspaper) took over and didn’t take kindly to this sort of behavior. When a wife filed an alienation of affection suit against a student of her husband, Hooker fired him. Even though the professor had tenure, there was a clause that allowed the firing if the faculty member committed a crime using university property. Since he had given her a scholarship and had sex with the student in his office, he was fired. The humanities faculty went into an uproar. They declared the alienation of affection law ‘barbaric’, puritanical, and uncivilized. They basically claimed that they should be immune to the laws of the ‘backward South’ because they had degrees from prestigious schools in the Northeast.
Typical Newsletter headline of the time, “Faculty Office Sex Spurs Trustees to Demand Closed-door Meeting with Hooker for A Second Full Day”.
What the bolded misspelling “Sinima” in the intro deliberate irony?
I’ll never tell. But since you were the only one who noticed, I fixed it.