Kyrsten Sinema, the former independent Arizona senator who left office in January 2025, has acknowledged in a sworn court declaration that she carried on a "romantic and intimate" relationship with her former bodyguard, Matthew Ammel, while still serving in the United States Senate.
The admission was not made in a press conference or a carefully managed statement from a crisis PR firm. It came in a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed against her in North Carolina by Ammel's estranged wife, who accused Sinema of destroying her marriage.
According to Fox News, the estranged wife is suing under North Carolina's "alienation of affection" statute, one of only six states that still recognize such claims. She sought $25,000 in damages and, according to the filing, confronted Sinema directly.
"Are you having an affair with my husband? You took a married man away from his family."
Sinema's legal team responded not by denying the relationship but by arguing the court has no jurisdiction. The relationship, they contend, took place entirely outside North Carolina.
According to the court documents, the affair began in May 2024 in Sonoma, California. By June 2024, Sinema was sending encrypted Signal messages from Scottsdale to Ammel in Kansas. One of those messages, included in the filing, reads like something from a romance novel rather than a senator's phone:
"I keep waking up during my sleep and reaching over for your arms to hold me."
By that fall, another Signal exchange between the two was apparently interrupted by Ammel's estranged wife. The communications referenced in the filing reportedly occurred across cities in the U.S., but Sinema's attorneys argue none of them took place in North Carolina, which forms the basis of their motion to dismiss.
The legal strategy is straightforward: concede the affair, contest the venue. Whether it works is a question for the court. Whether it passes the smell test is a question for everyone else.
Kyrsten Sinema built her political identity on defiance. She left the Democratic Party in 2022, rebranding as an independent and positioning herself as a maverick willing to buck both sides. She styled herself as someone who operated on principle rather than partisan loyalty. The media, predictably, swooned when she bucked Democrats and seethed when she didn't fall in line with progressive orthodoxy.
But the maverick brand only works when there's an underlying seriousness to it. Carrying on a relationship with a married member of your own security detail while serving in the Senate doesn't project independence. It projects the kind of entitlement that Washington seems to breed in people who stay too long.
Sinema served in the Senate from 2019 to 2025. She chose not to seek reelection. At the time, that decision was framed as exhaustion with the political system. The timeline of the affair, beginning in May 2024 while she was still in office, now adds a layer to that story that her supporters probably didn't anticipate.
North Carolina is one of just six states that still allow alienation of affection lawsuits. To prevail, plaintiffs must prove three things:
These suits are often dismissed as antiquated, relics of an era when marriage was treated as a legal and social institution worth defending rather than a lifestyle arrangement. Progressives have spent decades arguing that these laws should be repealed. There is a certain irony in a former senator who caucused with Democrats now facing the consequences of a legal framework that the left considers outdated.
Sinema's attorneys are not challenging the law itself. They're arguing jurisdiction. The affair happened in California, Arizona, Kansas, and elsewhere, they say, just not in North Carolina. It's a procedural escape hatch, not a moral defense.
Fox News Digital reached out to Sinema for comment. The source material includes no response. That silence is notable, though not surprising. There is no good public statement for this situation. The sworn declaration already concedes the core facts. Anything else would just generate more headlines.
But the silence also fits a broader pattern in American political life. Officials conduct themselves one way in private and present an entirely different image to the public. When the gap between the two becomes undeniable, the instinct is always the same: say nothing, lawyer up, and hope the news cycle moves on.
Sometimes it does. But a scorned spouse with a lawsuit and a state law on her side tends to keep things in the public eye longer than a senator might prefer.
This story will be treated by many in the media as tabloid fodder. And there are tabloid elements to it: the encrypted messages, the bodyguard, the confrontation with the wife. But underneath the soap opera is something that matters. A sitting United States senator carried on an affair with a member of her own protective detail, a man whose job created an inherent power imbalance. His wife is now suing for the damage done to her family.
The $25,000 in damages she's seeking is almost beside the point. What she's really asking for is accountability. Whether the court in North Carolina can provide it depends on jurisdiction. Whether the public cares depends on whether we still expect anything from the people we send to Washington.
Increasingly, the answer seems to be no. And that might be the most damaging thing about this story.