Kyrsten Sinema Headed to Home-Wrecker Court After Judge Says Texts to Married Lover Could Leave Her Liable
"Alienation of affection" actions like the one Sinema is facing undermine the idea that adults have agency in their romantic and sexual choices.
Here's a bonkers story that sits squarely at the intersection of sex and tech. Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-Independent from Arizona, is headed to home-wrecker court in North Carolina due to some Signal messages she sent to a North Carolina man while he was married.
In North Carolina—and several other states, including Mississippi and South Dakota—coming between a married couple can still land you in civil court.
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"Alienation of affection" claims can be brought by a spurned spouse against a third party that they blame for the dissolution of their marriage. To be found liable in North Carolina, a person must be shown to have "maliciously and wrongfully cause[d] alienation of a genuine marital relationship."
In this case, Sinema is being sued by the ex-wife of Matthew Ammel, a man whom Sinema has admitted to having an affair with while he was her security guard.
The Ammels lived in North Carolina—but Sinema's affair with Matthew Ammel did not take place in North Carolina, she told the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina. (The case was moved to federal court at Sinema's request, but still concerns a North Carolina tort claim.) Because the affair did not take place in North Carolina, she can't be sued there and the court should dismiss the case, Sinema argued.
In a Friday ruling, U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon rejected Sinema's motion to dismiss, holding that Sinema can be sued in North Carolin because Sinema sent Signal messages to Ammel while he was physically there. Some of these messages were sexual, while others were about politics, psychedelics, mental health, or going to a Depeche Mode concert.
For this, Sinema may be legally liable as a home-wrecker under North Carolina common law.
"The evidence demonstrates that Ms. Sinema purposefully availed herself of the privilege of conducting activities in North Carolina by sending nine messages to Mr. Sinema, a married man, while he was in North Carolina," wrote Bragdon in his ruling. "These messages, considered together, show Ms. Sinema building and furthering a romantic relationship with Mr. Ammel—invading the marriage not just while he was away on trips with her but while he was home with his family in North Carolina."
So what can we take from this? Well, first, that if you must have an affair with someone from the Carolinas, try to stick to the southern one. Or at least make them prove they've crossed state lines before you text them about your concert plans and send them a picture of your bare back (another text for which Sinema is on the hook).
Kidding, of course. The real issues here are autonomy and state intrusion in personal matters.
In North Carolina, "it isn't just illicit lovers who might find themselves in the crosshairs," as The Wall Street Journal pointed out in April. "Meddling in-laws, persuasive friends, even a therapist or clergy member are all fair game." So, not only do alienation of affection and criminal conversation potentially punish people for consensual romantic or sexual relationships, but they could also wind up punishing people for speech.
No sexual activity need have taken place or be proven in court for an alienation of affection claim like the one filed by Heather Ammel in this case to succeed. "A sexual affair is covered by another homewrecker charge—called 'criminal conversation'—that many spurned spouses file simultaneously," the Journal points out.
There's been recent movement to end alienation of affection actions.
In January, New Mexico's Supreme Court abolished alienation of affection torts. "The inherently dehumanizing nature of the tort is reflected in the fact that, regardless of gender, it treats affections as property and presumes that a spouse has no agency regarding to whom they give their affections," the justices wrote.
A law passed this year in Utah ended the right of action for alienation of affections.
And a bill introduced in North Carolina last year would "abolish the common law civil actions of alienation of affection and criminal conversation." But that one hasn't gone anywhere since being referred to the state Senate's Committee on Rules and Operations in March of 2025.
In the meantime, people in North Carolina or involved with someone there can still find themselves on the hook for hefty sums for home-wrecking. "In November, a North Carolina jury ordered a TikTok influencer accused of seducing a woman's husband to pay $1.75 million in damages," Reason's Meagan O'Rourke wrote in April.
Alienation of affection actions like that one and the one Sinema is facing are a slap in the face to the idea that adults have agency in their romantic and sexual choices. They suggest that a straying spouse isn't responsible for their own actions; some third party is. They smack of old-fashioned tropes about married women only cheating because men were manipulative cads and married men only cheating because conniving temptresses seduced them.
In fact, claims like these are rooted in even older—and more patriarchal—notions. "Homewrecker claims—also dubbed heart-balm actions—are rooted in English common law, dating back to a time when a wife was considered 'chattel,' or the legal property of her husband," the Journal noted. "He could sue if she was stolen or enticed away. North Carolina adopted this common-law concept. Then, as women gained their legal independence, the state created a new rationale for the law—the preservation of marriage—and allowed women to sue, too."
But the opening up of this concept doesn't change the creepy and paternalistic premises undergirding it: that your spouse is like your property and you're owed compensation by any third party that sullies them or steals them away. That married adults are not responsible for their own actions. That the state should be invested in saving relationships or punishing people who act unkindly or unethically within them.
I have sympathy for Heather Ammel here, but I don't think she's entitled to a legal ruling against her ex-husband's mistress. It's not the state's place to condemn infidelity. And I also have sympathy for Sinema. Whatever judgment may have been lacking in her personal romantic choices, she doesn't deserve to be dragged into court over it and have her private texts with her former lover made public record. Here's hoping that the widespread attention to this case will at least prompt North Carolina to abolish alienation of affection actions like these.
Read This Thread
A memorial for Gloria SteinemIn 1963, Gloria Steinem put on a fake name, a fake age, a satin corset, and took a job as a Playboy Bunny.Then she took the ears off, went home, and spent the next sixty years telling the world what it means to work in the sex industry.
— SWOP Behind Bars (@swopbehindbars.bsky.social) 2026-09-06T22:13:33.362Z
In the News
Utah anti-VPN rule on pause: "The Utah Department of Commerce has agreed not to enforce a controversial law demanding age-verification on adult content websites and cracking down on VPNs that seek to get around it — at least until a federal judge rules in the case," reports Fox 13 News:
Aylo Freesites, the owner of some of the largest adult websites in the world including Pornhub, is suing Utah over the law. They have asked a federal judge for an injunction that would block the law from going into effect, arguing it subjects any website that hosts adult content to potential civil or criminal liability.
So far, U.S. District Court Judge David Barlow has yet to issue a ruling on Aylo's injunction request.
But in a recent court filing obtained by FOX 13 News, the Utah Department of Commerce and Aylo entered into a joint stipulation. The agency would not enforce the new law pending Judge Barlow's ruling or until after administrative rules setting the specific terms that adult sites would have to follow to comply with the law are hammered out. In exchange, Aylo agreed to keep its current "geofencing practices" in place (Pornhub and other sites have blocked Utah IP addresses as a political protest of the Utah State Legislature's bills).
On Substack
Lots of interesting research in Christopher Ferguson's newsletter this week, but this especially caught my eye:
Bonus: New Study Finds Mood Causes Social Media Use, Not the Inverse.
Another new study has come to light challenging the "smartphones made them do it" hypothesis. As the title puts it: "Adolescents' daily affect predicts their mobile phone use (not the other way around)." The study used objective tracking data for phone use over 90 days for 40 youth. Phone use did not predict either their mental health or sleep (see earlier point above). However, feeling blue in the morning did lead to more passive smartphone use during the day. This is an important "chicken and egg" left out of much of the conversation. Small sample size though, so confirmation from other studies would be good.
More Sex & Tech News
• More than 153 million drivers' licenses are being sold on the dark web, investigative journalist Brian Krebs reported last week. "Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana."
• The trial of Luis Uribe, a Customs and Border Patrol agent accused of serial rape and robberies against sex workers, gets underway this week.
• On November 16, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in Phoenix, will hear appeals from Backpage co-founder Michael Lacey and former executives Jed Brunst and Scott Spear, who were convicted of various offenses related to running a platform where sex workers advertised.
• Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has worked for OpenAI and was recently employed by Anthropic, quit his job with some dramatic flourish, warning on X that AI companies "are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." The response from Anthropic's lead alignment scientist Evan Hubinger isn't reassuring:
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. https://t.co/QAIHiFP3QZ
— Evan Hubinger (@EvanHub) September 9, 2026
• If you didn't think it was possible for online dating to get worse, think again: "The spread of AI-generated fake accounts has become a rising concern for dating apps," notes Wired, and as a result, "more and more, apps are asking that you surrender your most unique attribute in order to ensure that you're a real person: your face."
• An Arkansas library law targeting material harmful to minors is—to presumably no one's surprise—ensnaring way more than material harmful to minors:
Jesus Christ: after a recent ruling by the Eighth Circuit that allowed Act 372 to take effect, an Arkansas county has banned all children from checking out any books in the adult section, bringing home any DVDs, or using the self-checkout kiosk in its public libraries.
• "Did an identity thief write this?"
Setting aside all the civil liberties, privacy, and free expression concerns, online ID checks / "age verification" laws are just a massive massive security risk. Every time I read one of these bills I ask "did an identity thief write this?!"
— Evan Greer (@evangreer.bsky.social) 2026-09-02T20:07:03.063Z
• Already under fire in South Dakota, Mayday Health—a website that provides information about abortion-pill providers but does not provide pills or facilitate appointments—is now being sued by the state of Kentucky over ads at gas stations and the Kentucky State Fair.
• Libel laws often take the intent of the speaker into context. But how does that work when the speaker is an artificial intelligence chatbot?
