A North Carolina jury has put an unusually exact price on an affair: $850,002.
The verdict came Sept. 24 in Davidson County, where Tracey Hughes had spent years pursuing Jennifer Jo Cobb over a relationship with Hughes’ then-husband, Clayton Odie Hughes. Cobb is best known for a long NASCAR career, while Clayton Hughes spent years working as a NASCAR spotter, including during Martin Truex Jr.’s 2017 Cup Series championship season.
Hughes sued Cobb for alienation of affection and criminal conversation, two civil claims that survive in North Carolina even as most states have abandoned lawsuits that allow one spouse to pursue a third party over interference with a marriage.
By the time jurors considered Hughes’ claims, the case had accumulated competing versions of a 17-year marriage, private communications, racing trips, a separation agreement, a private investigator’s work and Cobb’s unsuccessful constitutional challenge to the laws themselves.
Before The Number
Hughes and Clayton Odie Hughes married in the Bahamas in September 2003 and remained together for more than 17 years before separating in January 2021.
In a lawsuit filed in Davidson County Superior Court, Hughes alleged that genuine love and affection still existed between them before Cobb became involved with her husband. She said Cobb knew Clayton Hughes was married and still living with his wife when the two began communicating and meeting.
Her allegations described something much more sustained than a single encounter. Hughes accused Cobb of encouraging her husband to lie about what he was doing on trips, helping conceal the relationship and arranging what the complaint called “regular trysts,” while also describing sexual encounters, phone calls, emails, FaceTime messages, texts and “sexting” over a period of months.
Some of that alleged conduct was tied to racing travel, which placed Cobb and Clayton Hughes in the same professional world. Hughes said the relationship was already underway before she and her husband separated on Jan. 20, 2021.
Old Law
Alienation of affection and criminal conversation are sometimes grouped among old civil causes of action known as heart-balm torts, but they ask jurors to decide different things.
Alienation of affection requires a plaintiff to establish that genuine marital love and affection existed and that wrongful conduct by a third party was an effective cause of its loss. Criminal conversation is narrower: despite its name, it is not a criminal charge, but a civil claim based on sexual intercourse with someone else’s spouse during the marriage.
The claims run against the outside person accused of interfering with the marriage. That allowed Hughes to pursue Cobb for Cobb’s alleged conduct separately from the legal issues between Hughes and her husband during their separation and divorce.
Only a small number of states still recognize alienation-of-affection claims. New Mexico abolished the tort in January 2026, and Utah followed with legislation eliminating the cause of action effective May 6, 2026.
North Carolina has kept both claims while narrowing when they can be used. Under state law, conduct occurring after spouses physically separate with the intent that the separation remain permanent cannot support either cause of action, and a lawsuit generally must be filed within three years of the last act giving rise to it.
Cobb disputed Hughes’ factual account and challenged the legal system that allowed the lawsuit to proceed. Her answer rejected essentially all of the allegations that she had seduced Clayton Hughes, helped him conceal the relationship or caused his marriage to break apart, while her attorneys separately argued that North Carolina’s alienation-of-affection and criminal-conversation claims violated constitutional protections involving privacy, due process and equal protection.
They also sought to send the constitutional challenge to a three-judge panel, arguing in part that the traditional definition of sexual intercourse used in criminal-conversation cases did not operate evenly across same-sex and opposite-sex relationships. The judge rejected the transfer request and Cobb’s motion to dismiss, and the case continued through discovery.
Hughes and Cobb both appeared personally for mediation in January 2025. The mediator reported an impasse.
Two Versions
As trial approached, each side assembled documents that offered jurors a markedly different picture of what remained of the Hughes marriage before the separation.
Hughes planned to show photographs she characterized as depicting a happy marriage, along with cards and handwritten notes from Clayton Hughes. She also listed a private investigator’s report, Cobb’s deposition, a photograph of Clayton Hughes with Cobb, a timeline and communications produced during the litigation, placing affectionate material from the marriage beside evidence she intended to use in proving the relationship she blamed for its collapse.
Cobb’s proposed exhibits pulled in the other direction. Her list included a separation agreement Tracey and Clayton Hughes signed Jan. 18, 2021, two days before the separation date alleged in the complaint, earlier domestic litigation between the spouses and Hughes’ own handwritten notes concerning the marriage.
A marriage does not have to be flawless for an alienation-of-affection claim to survive.
In Hutelmyer v. Cox, Dorothy Hutelmyer presented evidence that she and her husband traveled together, coached their children’s soccer teams, volunteered in their community, and exchanged romantic poetry. For one Valentine’s Day, he recorded a collection of love songs for her, and the couple was still having sex once or twice a week before his secretary became increasingly close to him.
Co-workers watched that relationship develop as the pair began eating alone, working late and traveling together on business. His car was seen overnight at the secretary’s home, while colleagues described them holding hands and the secretary straightening his ties and brushing lint from his suits.
At home, Hutelmyer said her husband began spending less time with her and their children as their sex life deteriorated and eventually stopped. On Jan. 1, 1996, the secretary received an engagement ring; four days later, the husband left the marital home and moved in with her.
A jury awarded Hutelmyer $500,000 in compensatory damages and another $500,000 in punitive damages, and the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld the verdict. Existing problems in a marriage, the court held, do not automatically defeat the claim because the third party’s conduct need not be the sole cause of the lost affection if it was an effective cause.
That left Hughes and Cobb to fight over what the documents in their own case showed. Hughes had material she said reflected continuing affection inside the marriage, while Cobb had records she could use to challenge that portrayal and show that the relationship between the spouses had effectively reached its end.
A Jury’s Work
Companionship, affection, humiliation and emotional injury do not come with fixed economic values, leaving juries considerable room once they find that a legally recognized loss occurred.
North Carolina courts have allowed jurors to consider lost support and financial benefits alongside consortium, companionship, humiliation, mental anguish, injury to health and damage to a person’s feelings or reputation. Verdicts under those rules have ranged from nominal damages to millions of dollars.
In Boileau v. Seagrave, Pamela Boileau and her husband became friends with Ann Seagrave through their church before Seagrave and Boileau’s husband kissed in a restaurant parking lot and began a sexual relationship.
Jurors found Seagrave liable for alienation of affection and criminal conversation but assigned only $1 in actual damages to each claim, then awarded $5,000 and $105,000 in punitive damages. By then, Seagrave had accused Boileau of slandering her, and the same jury awarded Seagrave $100,000 in punitive damages on that claim, leaving Boileau with a net recovery of $10,001 after the competing awards were accounted for.
In Shackelford v. Lundquist, Cynthia Shackelford alleged that another woman had become involved with her husband following more than three decades of marriage. The defendant did not appear at trial, and jurors awarded $5 million in compensatory damages and $4 million in punitive damages across claims including alienation of affection, criminal conversation, and intentional or reckless infliction of emotional distress.
Another North Carolina case involved Jana Sprinkle, who had worked as oral surgeon Dr. Matthew Johnson’s surgical assistant for 17 years before their relationship became sexual. According to the appellate record, Johnson gave her a separate cellphone, and the two met in hotel rooms and at his Lake Norman home during an affair that lasted about four years.
The relationship unraveled after another employee discovered a sexual photograph of Sprinkle on Johnson’s phone, and the image eventually reached one of her relatives, leading Sprinkle to tell her husband. Although the couple remained together, her husband sued Johnson and obtained a jury verdict of $794,000 in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive damages. The judgment was later vacated because Johnson had not received proper notice of the trial.
Compensatory damages focus on what the plaintiff lost. Punitive damages serve a different purpose, and North Carolina law allows jurors setting them to consider the nature and duration of the conduct, concealment, whether the defendant profited and the defendant’s ability to pay, as evidenced by revenue or net worth.
The Clock
John Davis and his wife Sandra had children during the 1980s, years before one of Davis’ older children noticed a mismatch through 23andMe in 2018. Additional DNA testing established that Davis was not the biological father of his daughter Becky, and Sandra acknowledged having had sporadic unprotected sex decades earlier with Porter Horgan while knowing there was a possibility Horgan was Becky’s biological father.
Davis sued, and a Mississippi jury awarded $700,000. The Mississippi Supreme Court later reversed the verdict because the alienation claim had been filed too late; discovering the affair decades afterward did not revive a limitations period tied to the earlier deterioration of the marriage.
In Davidson County, Hughes’ complaint placed the alleged Cobb relationship before the Jan. 20, 2021 separation, while Cobb’s proposed evidence included the separation agreement the spouses signed two days earlier.
After Four Days
Hughes first sued Cobb in 2022 before voluntarily dismissing that case in 2023. She returned with the 2024 lawsuit, where discovery from the earlier litigation remained among the materials she prepared to use as the dispute moved through Cobb’s constitutional challenge, unsuccessful mediation, depositions and repeated trial scheduling before finally reaching a jury in September 2026.
The final pretrial order distilled that history into the questions jurors had to answer: whether Cobb had alienated Clayton Hughes’ affections and what damages followed if she had; whether she had engaged in criminal conversation with him and what that was worth; and whether Hughes had established grounds for punitive damages.
The trial began Sept. 21, and on Sept. 24 jurors found for Hughes on both underlying claims. They valued alienation of affection at $50,000 and criminal conversation at $800,000, putting $850,000 in compensatory damages on two legal injuries arising from the same relationship.
Jurors added $1 in punitive damages on the alienation-of-affection claim and another $1 on criminal conversation.
The final number was $850,002.