Former Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has confirmed what court documents now make explicit: she carried on a romantic relationship with her married bodyguard for months, with encounters spanning the country. But in a new motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the man’s estranged wife, Sinema argues the locations of their trysts actually work in her favor, because none of them happened in North Carolina.
According to Sinema’s court filing, the relationship with Matthew Ammel began in late May 2024, approximately five months before he separated from his wife, Heather Ammel. The former senator provides strikingly specific details about their first intimate encounter, placing it on May 27 in Sonoma, California.
The document reads like a travel log of a burgeoning romance. Sinema states they were also physically intimate in New York City, Washington, D.C., Aspen, and Phoenix in the months that followed. The geographical precision isn’t accidental; it’s the foundation of her legal argument.
Heather Ammel filed her lawsuit against Sinema in North Carolina in September 2025. The estranged wife accuses Sinema of sending romantic messages to Matthew while he was in North Carolina, including an alleged photo of the former senator wrapped in only a towel.
Sinema flatly denies sending any such photograph. But more crucially, she argues that even if she did, she had no knowledge he was in North Carolina at the time. Without that knowledge, she contends, the communication can’t establish personal jurisdiction over her in that state.
The legal principle at play is straightforward: courts typically need a defendant to have sufficient “minimum contacts” with a state before exercising jurisdiction. Sinema’s legal team is essentially arguing that zero physical encounters in North Carolina plus zero intentional communications directed there equals zero grounds for a lawsuit in that state.
Her filing admits the relationship existed but frames it as a series of encounters in California, New York, D.C., Colorado, and Arizona. None of those places are North Carolina.
For Sinema, the legal battle adds an unwelcome chapter to her post-Senate life. The independent former Democrat left office in January 2025 after a single term, choosing not to seek reelection. She’d spent years as a pivotal swing vote in a divided chamber, frustrating progressives and earning bipartisan criticism for her approach to legislative negotiations.
Now she’s fighting a different kind of battle, one that puts her personal life under a microscope. The motion to dismiss argues the lawsuit doesn’t belong in North Carolina courts. If a judge agrees, Heather Ammel would need to refile in a jurisdiction with actual ties to the alleged conduct.
For now, Sinema’s strategy is clear: admit the affair, dispute the details, and fight on procedural ground. Location, as they say, is everything.
