Heather Ammel’s lawsuit against former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has pushed an old and stubborn marriage tort back into the spotlight, with the case turning on whether a third party can be held civilly liable for breaking up a home. The dispute centers on North Carolina’s alienation of affection law, one of the few surviving “heart balm” claims in the country, and the fight now mixes questions of intimacy, jurisdiction, and constitutional limits.
Sinema has acknowledged an affair with Matthew Ammel while serving as Arizona’s Democratic senator, and the lawsuit filed by his wife says that relationship caused real damage to the marriage. That kind of claim may sound like a relic from another era, but it still exists in a handful of states and can bring a very modern legal mess into court.
Alienation of affection is one of those torts that refuses to disappear cleanly. Most states wiped it away long ago, leaving only a small group that still recognize it, including North Carolina, Mississippi, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah, and Hawaii. The law grew out of older notions of marriage, duty, and personal injury, and it has never stopped making lawyers and judges argue.
These cases used to sit alongside morality crimes that punished conduct like adultery or homosexuality, but those criminal laws largely faded as constitutional law and social norms changed. Civil liability survived in a different form, though, because the claim is aimed at the harm done to a spouse rather than a direct punishment for sex itself. That distinction is doing a lot of work in the Sinema case.
At the center of the fight is a messy old concept often called a “heart balm” action. The basic theory is that a third party interfered with a marriage by enticing a spouse away, and that the injured spouse should be able to seek damages for the loss of affection and stability.
Early versions of the tort spoke in terms of enticement and seduction. Enticement involved helping or persuading a wife to leave her husband, while seduction was more direct and focused on an adulterous relationship with the spouse of the plaintiff. The language may feel antique now, but the legal framework still carries the weight of its origins.
That history is also why the tort draws sharp criticism. Detractors say it grew out of a time when a wife was treated almost like property, and they argue that it raises serious constitutional problems when applied to consensual adult relationships. Supporters counter that a marriage is a real legal bond, and when someone intentionally tears at it, the injured spouse should not be left empty-handed.
Court opinions over the years have not been shy about calling the tort outdated and ripe for abuse. Judges have warned that these suits can become tools for coercion, publicity games, and pressure settlements, especially when the threat of scandal does as much damage as the lawsuit itself. Still, the law remains on the books in a few places, which means it can still bite.
Sinema’s team has tried to knock out the case on jurisdictional grounds, arguing that none of the alleged sexual conduct happened in North Carolina. That leaves a key question hanging in the air: if the affair touched other states, can North Carolina still hear a claim because the marriage and its alleged injury were rooted there?
The factual record already described in the case is not exactly subtle. The filings and depositions point to encounters in California, New York City, Washington, D.C., Arizona, and Colorado, along with messages that read like a trail of emotional wreckage. The allegations suggest a relationship that spread across state lines and into every corner of the couple’s life.
That cross-country trail matters because it blurs the line between private conduct and legal injury. The defense says the law should not stretch to cover a relationship that unfolded elsewhere, while the plaintiff’s side says the harm landed at home, where the marriage and family were actually based. That is where the dispute gets interesting, and where old doctrines start colliding with modern travel, modern relationships, and modern courts.
The constitutional angle is not simple either. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges protected same-sex marriage, but it did not erase alienation of affection claims or say states could not regulate civil harms tied to marriage. So the legal fight is not really about whether adultery is private, but whether a state can still treat a deliberate destruction of a marriage as a compensable wrong.
For Heather Ammel, the claim is rooted in the idea that a marriage contract meant something and that the betrayal did not happen in a vacuum. For Sinema, the challenge is whether a relationship between consenting adults can still trigger liability under a law many people think belongs in the museum. The courtroom will have to decide whether this old tort still has teeth, and the answer could echo far beyond one high-profile affair.
