RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema acknowledges having a romantic relationship with a member of her security detail that began while she was a lawmaker, according to legal documents. But she also contends she shouldn't be subject to a lawsuit by the man's ex-wife who blames Sinema for the marriage breakup.
The North Carolina federal court litigation seeks financial damages from Sinema, who represented Arizona in the U.S. House and later the Senate for one term that ended early last year.
Heather Ammel contends in a lawsuit that she and husband Matthew had “a good and loving marriage” and “genuine love and affection” existed between them before Sinema interfered, pursuing him despite knowing he was married.
In a signed March 7 declaration attached to a lawsuit response filed this week, Sinema said her relationship with Matthew Ammel “became romantic and intimate” at the end of May 2024 and “physically intimate” over the next several months in California, New York, Colorado, Arizona and Washington, D.C. The Ammels separated in November 2024, the lawsuit said.
North Carolina is one of a handful of states that allow jilted spouses to sue for “alienation of affection” to seek damages from a third party responsible for the breakup of their marriage.
Sinema's declaration rejects allegations by Heather Ammel that Sinema made phone calls and sent internet communications to her husband with the knowledge that he was physically present in North Carolina and at times with his wife and the couple's children. Sinema did send Matthew Hamel a message while he was in North Carolina after he had already found a new place to live and “when the marriage was already over,” Sinema attorney Steven Epstein wrote in asking the lawsuit to be dismissed.
Sinema’s “conduct related to her romantic relationship with Mr. Ammel does not connect her to North Carolina in a meaningful way,” Epstein wrote Thursday, adding that no jury would believe that the one message “had any bearing on the destruction of marital love and affection.”
Sinema's head of security hired Ammel after he retired from the Army in 2022, according to the lawsuit, and in early 2024, Heather Ammel discovered messages between Sinema and her husband on the Signal messaging app that were of “romantic and lascivious natures.” That summer, Matthew Ammel stopped wearing his wedding ring and Sinema gave him a job on her Senate staff while he continued to work as her bodyguard, the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit was initially filed late last year in North Carolina state court, but it was moved to federal court in January.
Sinema declined to seek Senate reelection in 2024 following a term in which she left the Democratic Party to become an independent. She now works for a Washington-based legal and lobbying firm.
FILE - Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., questions witnesses during a Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs hearings to examine recent bank failures and the Federal regulatory response on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)
Construction is finished on a major Massachusetts offshore wind farm, the first project to reach this stage during President Donald Trump's time in office.
Offshore construction was completed Friday night on Vineyard Wind with the installation of the final blades, Craig Gilvarg, a spokesperson for the project, said Saturday.
Trump, who often talks about his hatred of wind power, has said his goal is to not let any “windmills” be built. Vineyard Wind was one of five major East Coast offshore wind projects the Trump administration halted construction on days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Developers and states sued, and federal judges allowed all five to resume construction, essentially concluding that the government did not show that the national security risk was so imminent that construction must halt.
Another one of the five, Revolution Wind, began sending power for the first time to New England’s electric grid on Friday and will scale up in the weeks ahead until it is fully operational.
While Revolution Wind just began delivering power, Vineyard Wind has been doing so for over a year as more turbines were finished. Vineyard Wind is a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, located 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, Massachusetts. It has 62 turbines that will generate a total of 800 megawatts. That is enough clean electricity to power about 400,000 homes.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell has said the completion of this project is essential to ensuring the state can lower costs, meet rising energy demand, advance its climate goals and sustain thousands of good-paying jobs.
The Trump administration has been particularly critical of the Vineyard Wind project because of a blade failure. Fiberglass fragments of a blade broke apart and began washing onto Nantucket beaches in July 2024 during the peak of tourist season. Manufacturer GE Vernova agreed to pay $10.5 million in a settlement to compensate island businesses that suffered losses.
Vineyard Wind submitted state and federal project plans to build an offshore wind farm in 2017. Massachusetts had committed to offshore wind by requiring its utilities to solicit proposals for up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2027. In what might have been a fatal blow, federal regulators delayed Vineyard Wind by holding off on issuing a key environmental impact statement in 2019. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. William Keating said at the time the Trump administration was trying to stymie the renewable energy project just as it was coming to fruition.
The Biden administration signed off on it in 2021, as it sought to ramp up offshore wind as a climate change solution. Construction began onshore in Barnstable, Massachusetts.
The first U.S. offshore wind farm opened off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016, at the end of President Barack Obama's tenure. But with just five turbines, it’s not a commercial-scale wind farm. The nation's first commercial-scale offshore wind farm officially opened in March 2024, when President Joe Biden was in office. Danish wind energy developer Orsted and the utility Eversource built that 12-turbine wind farm, called South Fork Wind, 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York.
Trump began reversing the country’s energy policies his first day in office with a spate of executive orders aimed at boosting oil, gas and coal. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said Friday night that Trump “reversed course on Joe Biden’s costly green energy agenda that gave preferential treatment to intermittent, unreliable energy sources and instead is aggressively unleashing reliable and affordable energy sources to lower energy bills, improve our grid stability and protect our national security.”
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FILE - Giant wind turbine blades for the Vineyard Winds project are stacked on racks in the harbor, July 11, 2023, in New Bedford, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)
