Matthew Ammel, the former bodyguard-turned-lover of ex-senator Kyrsten Sinema, faces a felony criminal damage charge after allegedly destroying more than $200,000 worth of property at her Cave Creek, Arizona, home, while demanding she post a video to social media.
Ammel, 39, an Army veteran who once served on Sinema's Senate security detail, was arrested on September 17 after Maricopa County sheriff's deputies linked him to an August 30 incident in which 22 paintings were ripped from the walls of Sinema's five-bedroom home and hurled into her backyard pool. Investigators valued those paintings alone at $123,015. Sinema was out of town when the destruction allegedly took place.
Court documents obtained by Arizona's Family describe a scene that went beyond the paintings. Ammel allegedly smashed expensive bottles of liquor, shattered a large wall-mounted mirror by throwing a glass bottle at it, and spray-painted a painting near the front door with black lettering. Deputies said the total damage to the home, its contents, and the pool exceeded $200,000.
The charge, one count of criminal damage, a class 4 felony under Arizona law, carries up to four years in prison. Ammel was released on an electronic monitor and is due back in court on October 1.
Court filings lay out a specific trigger for the alleged rampage. Ammel threatened to damage Sinema's paintings every 10 minutes unless she posted a video on her X account. Sinema refused. The filings do not describe what the video showed or why Ammel wanted it posted.
Sinema handed deputies texts, videos, and surveillance footage that she said showed Ammel destroying her property. Deputies used that material to identify him. Before his arrest, Ammel had been taken to a behavioral health center following a petition for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation. He was arrested after his release from the facility.
At his first hearing, Ammel did not appear before a judge in person. A Maricopa County sheriff's deputy told the court during a recorded proceeding that "they're saying that he's combative and he's in the hallway."
The criminal case is only one thread in a broader tangle of legal and personal conflict surrounding Sinema and Ammel. Heather Ammel, Matthew's ex-wife, is suing Sinema in federal court in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, under the state's "alienation of affection" statute, one of a handful of state laws that allow a spouse to sue a third party for interfering in a marriage. Heather Ammel is seeking at least $75,000 in damages and accuses Sinema of destroying her 14-year marriage.
Sinema hired Matthew Ammel to her security team in 2022. Congressional salary records from Legistorm show he earned more than $90,000 for six months of work in her Senate office. Heather Ammel's suit alleges the affair began shortly after that hiring.
Ammel allegedly told his wife that Sinema got "handsy" with him at a music festival in Tempe, Arizona, in March 2024. In a July deposition, Sinema testified that the relationship turned sexual on May 27, 2024, during a visit to Napa, California. She said later encounters took place in New York, Washington, Colorado, and Arizona, but never in North Carolina.
That geographic detail mattered. Sinema argued the North Carolina court had no jurisdiction over her. U.S. District Judge David Bragdon disagreed. He ruled this month that nine texts Sinema sent Ammel while Ammel was in North Carolina were enough to establish the court's authority. In a footnote to his ruling, Judge Bragdon wrote that Ammel "does not have a record of telling the truth in this matter", a pointed assessment of the man at the center of both cases.
The civil complaint goes further than the affair itself. Heather Ammel's suit alleges that in 2023, Sinema told Matthew Ammel to bring MDMA, also known as ecstasy, on a work trip so she could "guide him through a psychedelic experience." That allegation has not been adjudicated, and Sinema appeared at a federal hearing in Winston-Salem on August 19, just 11 days before the alleged property destruction at her Cave Creek home.
Sinema, who left the Democratic Party to become an independent during her single Senate term and did not seek reelection in 2024, now works as a senior adviser at the Washington law firm Hogan Lovells. She had been known on Capitol Hill for her distinctive style and for an unlikely friendship with former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. A neighbor told the Daily Mail that Sinema had planned extra security since moving into the Cave Creek home more than a year ago because she had received threats. The same neighbor recalled seeing Ammel's truck parked outside the house and Ammel doing yard work, suggesting he once lived at the property.
By Wednesday, a construction crew was spotted building a wall around the property. A worker said they had been on the job for about two weeks.
Sinema now faces legal exposure on two fronts, as the victim of an alleged felony in Arizona and as the defendant in a civil suit in North Carolina. Ammel faces a criminal trial in Maricopa County and a credibility problem flagged by a federal judge. Heather Ammel's lawsuit continues. The contents of the video Ammel allegedly demanded Sinema post remain unknown. The lettering he allegedly spray-painted on the painting near the front door has not been publicly described.
None of the central questions, what drove Ammel's alleged ultimatum, what the video contained, or how deeply the affair entangled Sinema's official office with her personal life, have been answered in court filings made public so far.
When a former senator's bodyguard is allegedly smashing her paintings into a swimming pool and a federal judge is already questioning that man's honesty, the situation has moved well past the point where anyone involved can treat it as a private matter. The courts will sort out the legal liability. The public is left to wonder how this much wreckage, personal, financial, and legal, piled up around a sitting senator's office without anyone raising a flag sooner.
