Judge allows 'homewrecker' lawsuit against former Sen Kyrsten Sinema to move forward

North Carolina still has an "alienation of affection" statute on the books, and apparently Kyrsten Sinema just found out the hard way. A judge ruled her own text messages are enough to establish jurisdiction, meaning this "homewrecker" lawsuit gets to proceed. That's a phrase you don't expect to see attached to a former United States senator, but here we are.

There's something almost quaint about a law like this surviving into 2024, and plenty of legal scholars will tell you it's a relic that ought to be repealed. Maybe so. But relic or not, it's the law in North Carolina, and Sinema doesn't get a pass on it just because she spent years cultivating an image as the Senate's most unpredictable free agent. She built a career out of doing things her own way, rules be damned, and now a court says her own messages may have created a paper trail that puts her squarely inside a jurisdiction she'd probably rather not be in.

What's notable here isn't the law itself, it's the reminder that public figures who spend years being untouchable in Washington are still just private citizens once they leave. Sinema cut ties with the Democratic Party, went independent, then declined to run for reelection altogether. She's out of office and out of the protective bubble that comes with it. Turns out ordinary civil law doesn't care about your Senate voting record or your reputation for bipartisan dealmaking.

We're not in the business of relishing someone's messy personal life playing out in a courtroom. But there's a certain irony in a politician famous for evading every label and every consequence finally running into a small-town statute that doesn't care who you used to be.