Across 265 starts in NASCAR’s national touring series, Jennifer Jo Cobb’s entries collected about $1.66 million in posted purse money, according to the career database at Racing-Reference. A jury in Lexington, North Carolina, has now decided she owes one woman a little more than half of that.
The number is $850,002. The last two dollars are not a typo.
The verdict came Sept. 24 in Davidson County Superior Court, in a civil suit filed by Tracey Hughes. According to court records described by WFMY News 2 in Greensboro, jurors found for Hughes on every question they were asked. They awarded $800,000 on a claim of criminal conversation, $50,000 on a claim of alienation of affections, and then, after finding Cobb liable for punitive damages on both claims, set those punitive damages at $1 apiece.
Cobb denied the allegations in her answer to the lawsuit. The verdict is not yet a final judgment.
A crime that isn’t, and a conversation that wasn’t
North Carolina is one of the few states that still lets a spouse sue the third party in an affair. It does so through two old common-law claims that lawyers call “heart balm” torts.
Criminal conversation is the more confusingly named of the two. It is not a crime; nobody is prosecuted and nobody goes to jail. It is also not about conversation. It is a civil claim that turns on one question: whether the defendant had sex with the plaintiff’s husband or wife while the marriage was still intact. Alienation of affections is the softer-sounding one, and it asks whether the defendant’s wrongful conduct destroyed the love in the marriage.
Put the two awards side by side and the jury valued the claim about sex at 16 times the claim about love.
Worth punishing. Punished by $1.
The punitive piece is where the verdict gets strange. In North Carolina, a jury can’t award punitive damages just because it dislikes a defendant. Under G.S. 1D-15, the plaintiff has to prove fraud, malice, or willful or wanton conduct, and has to prove it by clear and convincing evidence, a higher bar than the rest of a civil case.
By the account of the court records, this jury cleared that bar twice. Then it set the punishment at a dollar per claim.
It had plenty of room to go higher. State law caps punitive damages at three times compensatory damages or $250,000, whichever is greater. With $850,000 in compensatory damages on the table, the ceiling was $2.55 million. Jurors used $2 of it.
A lawsuit on a three-year clock
Hughes filed suit on Jan. 5, 2024. According to her complaint as described in the court coverage, she and her husband married in 2003 and separated in January 2021, and she accused Cobb of an affair with him during the months before the split. The complaint alleged phone calls, text messages and meetings in North Carolina and other states while traveling for racing.
North Carolina puts two limits on these cases in G.S. 52-13. Nothing that happens after a couple permanently separates can count. And the suit has to be filed within three years of the defendant’s last act. Taken together, those rules mean the conduct at issue had to predate a January 2021 separation, and the complaint arrived in the first week of January 2024. There was not much calendar left.
The constitutional detour
Cobb tried to end the case before it reached a jury. According to the court records, she moved to dismiss in April 2024, arguing that the law allowing Hughes’ claims is unconstitutional, and asked that the challenge go to a three-judge panel in Wake County. Superior Court Judge Eric Morgan denied both requests in December 2024.
That argument has been tried before. In 2017, a trial judge threw out a set of heart balm claims as facially unconstitutional, and the North Carolina Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in Malecek v. Williams. The appeals court held that both torts survive First and Fourteenth Amendment challenges because the state has a legitimate interest in protecting marriages. The legislature narrowed the claims in 2009, adding the separation and three-year limits, but has never repealed them.
Court-ordered mediation ended at an impasse in January 2025. After several postponements, the trial began Sept. 21 and ran three days.
What that $1.66 million actually was
The comparison to Cobb’s racing income is, if anything, generous to the racing side. The Kansas City, Kansas, native spent most of her career as an owner-driver, fielding her own equipment. Racing-Reference lists 234 Truck Series starts from 2008 through 2024, worth $1,242,134, and 31 starts in the series now called the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series from 2004 through 2018, worth $417,500.
Those are purse figures paid to the entry, not a salary. For a small team that builds and runs its own trucks, that money also buys the tires, the fuel, the engines and the crew. Net of those costs, $850,002 is a larger share of what racing actually left in her pocket than the 51 percent the raw numbers suggest.
What happens next
Nothing is collected yet. Either side can file post-trial motions, and Cobb can appeal once a judgment is entered. If she does, an appellate court will likely be asked the same question the trial judge already answered: whether a state in 2026 can still let one spouse sue a third party for the end of a marriage.
Racing has had its share of courtroom fights lately, from the claims against Greg Biffle’s estate to Rev Racing’s parts-bill lawsuit and the fight over a $140,000 Chevelle restoration involving Jimmie Johnson’s brother. This one turned on a legal theory older than the automobile.
Should North Carolina keep letting spouses sue the other person in an affair, or is it time for heart balm laws to go the way of carburetors?