An alienation of affections claim against former US Senator Kyrsten Sinema has survived a motion to dismiss, with a federal judge ruling the case can proceed to trial. The lawsuit, filed by Heather Ammel in North Carolina, one of the few remaining jurisdictions where the tort still exists, raises questions about the conceptual foundations of the action itself: is a third-party lover actually at fault, or only the unfaithful spouse?
The facts alleged are not in dispute in broad outline. The Guardian reports that Sinema admitted in court filings to having a ‘romantic and intimate’ relationship with Matthew Ammel, a married member of her security detail, during her final year in office. According to NBC News, Ammel joined Sinema’s security team after retiring from the Army in 2022 and accompanied her on domestic and foreign travel. Heather Ammel’s complaint alleges that in early 2024 she discovered ‘romantic and lascivious’ messages her husband had exchanged with Sinema over the Signal messaging app; that summer he stopped wearing his wedding ring, and Sinema gave him a position as a national security fellow in her Senate office while he continued to work for her campaign as a bodyguard.
Sinema’s lawyers argued, among other things, that the alleged relationship took place entirely outside North Carolina. Carolina Journal reports that Heather Ammel’s April 2026 court filings dispute that contention. The federal judge rejected the motion to dismiss, and the case will proceed, subject to any onward appeal.
The Alienation of Affections Claim and Complicity
A common objection to this class of litigation runs as follows: the unfaithful spouse made a promise of fidelity; the lover made no such promise to the other spouse; therefore the lover bears no legal fault. The argument has surface appeal, but it does not withstand scrutiny when placed alongside the broader framework of civil liability.
The correct analogy is complicity. Where Alan commits an intentional wrong against Betty, and Cathy encourages or assists that wrong, Cathy is generally liable. The mechanism varies: solicitation where she urges the act, aiding and abetting or conspiracy where she participates in it. These doctrines apply in civil proceedings as well as criminal ones.
The closest civil parallel is intentional interference with contract, a tort recognised in English law since Lumley v. Gye (1853) 118 Eng. Rep. 749 (Q.B.), whose elements were later codified in the Restatement (Second) of Torts in 1979, as Trepanier MacGillis Battina notes in its analysis of subsequent Restatement reform. If Alan has contracted with Betty and Cathy induces his breach, Cathy is liable to Betty. The contracting parties do not own each other: Alan is not Betty’s property. But his knowing breach, induced by a third party who was aware of the contract, grounds liability in that third party.
Alienation of affections operates on the same logic. It does not depend on any claim that one spouse owns the other. As Jonathan Turley has observed, early tort doctrine recognised two distinct forms of the wrong: ‘enticement,’ which involved inducing a spouse to leave by means of persuasion or fraud, and ‘seduction,’ which required only proof of an adulterous relationship between the defendant and the plaintiff’s spouse. Both forms share the feature that the defendant must have known of the marriage and acted in a way that contributed to its breakdown.
Complicity liability generally requires that the secondary party knew of the underlying wrong; negligent assistance is sufficient in narrow categories (negligent entrustment of vehicles or weapons, for instance) but not as a general rule. Where a defendant knew the person was married, that knowledge requirement is ordinarily met.
Why the Tort Has Retreated
None of this means the tort should be preserved. The alienation of affections action has now been abolished in 45 states, and the New Mexico Supreme Court joined that majority in February 2026, among the most recent jurisdictions to do so. The reasons for abolition are largely functional: the difficulties of proof, the potential for extortionate litigation, the privacy interests of all parties, and the limited causal weight a third party’s conduct actually bears on a marriage already under strain.
Those are pragmatic objections, and they carry weight. What they are not is a principled objection grounded in the idea that the third party bears no fault at all. As the case filed by Heather Ammel in North Carolina moves towards trial, the conceptual question sharpens: the survival of the tort in a small number of jurisdictions means courts will have to grapple, on specific facts, with precisely how far complicity liability extends into the domain of intimate relationships. The outcome of the Sinema litigation may supply one of the few recent appellate records on that question.
