Kyrsten Sinema spent her entire Senate career perfecting one move: the dodge. When constituents begged her to support a $15 minimum wage, she gave them a thumbs-down and a curtsy. When organizers demanded she protect voting rights, she hid behind the filibuster like it was a load-bearing wall. When progressives asked her to stand for literally anything, she became an independent and walked away. So it tracks that her first instinct when Heather Ammel filed an alienation-of-affection lawsuit against her was to try to dodge that too. A federal judge in North Carolina just told her no.
U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon denied Sinema’s motion to dismiss the case this week, ruling that North Carolina has jurisdiction over the claims. Sinema’s argument was that she had no meaningful connection to the state. She acknowledged the sexual relationship with Matthew Ammel in a deposition but said the encounters happened in New York, Washington, Colorado, and Arizona. Never North Carolina. As if geography is a shield when you are sending messages into someone’s home in a state where his wife and three children live.
Here is what the record shows. Matthew Ammel was on Sinema’s security detail. He is a retired Army veteran who joined her protective team in 2022 and traveled with her domestically and internationally. Sinema said in her July 31 deposition that the first sexual encounter happened around Memorial Day 2024 at an Airbnb in Napa, California. That same summer, according to Heather Ammel’s lawsuit, Ammel stopped wearing his wedding ring and was handed a job as a national security fellow in Sinema’s Senate office. Heather Ammel discovered the affair in early 2024 after reading nine messages Sinema sent to her husband while he was in North Carolina. The Ammels separated on Nov. 1, 2024. Their divorce was finalized in March 2026.
Let us name the power dynamic plainly, because it is the part of this story that should make everyone uncomfortable regardless of party. A sitting United States senator had a sexual relationship with a member of her own security detail and then moved that man into a paid position in her Senate office. That is not a personal matter. That is a workplace power imbalance with the weight of a federal office behind it. The people who staff Capitol Hill, the advocates who lobby it, and the voters who send these officials to Washington deserve a system that treats that kind of conduct as the accountability issue it is, not a lifestyle footnote.
Sinema’s lawyers, Steven Epstein and Abigail Jenkins, did not respond to requests for comment. Of course they did not. What do you say when a judge finds that your client was “furthering a romantic relationship” and “invading” a marriage both on the road and when the man was home with his family?
North Carolina is one of the few states that still recognizes alienation-of-affection claims, a legal framework that lets a spouse sue a third party for destroying a marriage. These laws have critics, and fair ones. But in this case, the law is doing something the U.S. Senate never did: forcing Sinema to sit in a room and answer for her conduct under oath. She gave that deposition in a law office in Raleigh. She had to show up. She could not walk out. She could not change her registration. She could not filibuster.
Heather Ammel is seeking damages for the destruction of what she called a “good and loving marriage.” Whether she wins is for a jury to decide. But the ruling that got her there matters beyond one lawsuit. It says that power, no matter how carefully curated, does not get to pick the jurisdiction where it answers for the harm it causes. Sinema built a career on never being held to account by anyone. A judge in North Carolina just drew the line.
The Senate Ethics Committee never opened an investigation into a senator sleeping with her own security detail and then employing him in her office. That failure is its own scandal. Accountability should not depend on a state tort law from a century ago to do what institutional oversight was designed to do. But here we are, and at least someone is finally making her answer.