NASCAR Love Triangle Shines Light on North Carolina’s Romance Scene

Tracey Hughes’s suspicions hardened into certainty when her husband’s phone sounded as he stood in the shower. She had long wondered whether Clayton was involved with his fiery, red-haired boss, but he had denied any affair. Then a message appeared.

Sent via Snapchat by a woman using a red-haired avatar, it read: ‘I hate when I wake up in the morning before you. I love you. And I had the worst nightmare about us last night.’

Hughes was first shocked—and then enraged.

She told the Daily Mail: ‘I took the phone while he was still in the shower, and I said to him: “Tell her her nightmare came true.”‘

It was not an empty threat. Hughes intended to confront the woman and end the relationship.

Last month, six years after that message was sent, Hughes won $850,000 in damages from Jennifer Jo Cobb, one of the few women to reach NASCAR’s highest levels of competition.

Cobb, 53, remained legally married to Eddie Troconis, once the crew chief of her NASCAR team, when a private investigator told the court he had discovered her having ‘rambunctious’ sex with Clayton Hughes, Tracey’s husband of 17 years.

Clayton, now 58 and the father of the couple’s two sons, was working as Cobb’s ‘spotter’ at the time. From a grandstand roof, the spotter watches the race through binoculars and relays vital information to the driver over a headset. In this case, the pair’s mutual attraction had consequences far beyond the track—ultimately helping bring Clayton’s marriage to an end.

A North Carolina jury concluded that Cobb had seduced Hughes’s husband and awarded the betrayed wife substantial damages under the state’s controversial ‘homewrecker law.’ The statute is often called the Jolene law, a reference to Dolly Parton’s 1973 song about another woman trying to take a lover.

Hughes, 63, laughs when asked about the twist of a woman with the ‘flaming locks of auburn hair’ mentioned in the song becoming the other woman in her own story.

‘Oh, Jolene,’ she said. ‘I know.’

North Carolina is among only four states where these laws remain on the books. Utah and New Mexico abolished theirs this year.

In North Carolina, Mississippi, Hawaii and South Dakota, a spouse can bring a civil case against the person accused of breaking up the marriage if they can show that the relationship was loving and committed. Claims may seek damages for ‘alienation of affection’ and ‘criminal conversation,’ the legal term for sexual intercourse. These cases are known as ‘heart balm torts’ and are intended to offer financial compensation to a betrayed spouse.

Kyrsten Sinema, the former Arizona senator, is also facing a lawsuit from a North Carolina woman who alleges that Sinema seduced her husband while he was employed as Sinema’s bodyguard. A judge rejected Sinema’s bid to dismiss the case in September, allowing the proceedings to continue.

In November 2025, a jury ordered 27-year-old TikTok influencer Brenay Kennard to pay Akira Montague $1.75 million after finding her liable for contributing to the collapse of Montague’s marriage to Tim Montague. Kennard, who is now married to Tim, is appealing the decision.

And in 2011, a North Carolina judge ordered the mistress of trucking executive Donald Puryear to pay $30 million to his former wife, Carol Puryear. It remains unclear whether the award was ever collected. Neither Carol Puryear nor her attorneys responded to the Daily Mail’s requests for comment.

The legal tradition dates back to England, where an abolished statute once allowed husbands to seek compensation from men accused of taking their ‘property’—their wives.

Critics argue that although both men and women can now be sued, the law, dating from the mid 1800s, is outdated and should be repealed.

Victoria Gillispie Hardin, founder and owner of Hardin Law Firm, said she often advises wronged spouses against pursuing the claim.

‘The only people who win in these cases are the lawyers,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘Unless it’s a professional athlete, it’s rarely worth it.’

Gillispie Hardin said some may pursue the case to ‘make this other woman’s life a living hell.’

She added: ‘But I would say to her, rather than spending hundreds of thousands on an attorney, go take that trip of a lifetime, get that plastic surgery.’

Those caught up in the cases can find themselves ruined. Michael Freeman, 54, was sued by Brian McCoy after McCoy claimed his wife of a decade, Angela, left him amid a brief relationship with Freeman.

At the time Freeman was a courthouse deputy in North Carolina’s Iredell County, while Angela was a courthouse clerk.

‘I was introduced to Angela in March of 2004, and did tell Angela that out of respect for Mr McCoy, she would have to obtain legal separation papers before I would start seeing her,’ he said. ‘She got those papers on April 9th of 2004.’

Nonetheless, McCoy sued the following year, and in July 2011 was awarded $2.3 million in damages, which Freeman told the Daily Mail ruined him.

‘I wasn’t even invited to the trial in 2011 – and I didn’t know about the damages until four years later,’ Freeman said. ‘I brought a case against my accuser in 2015, and he then did not show. It was an extremely painful mess.’

Freeman, who claims he was never given a chance to defend himself, said the bank foreclosed his home, and Iredell County fired him from his job. He then was declared bankrupt.

Robert Inge, McCoy’s lawyer, told the Salisbury Post in December 2011 that the case was not about the money, but rather about making a point. Inge did not respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment, and McCoy died in a hospice in April 2020, at the age of 48. Angela, now remarried and contacted by the Daily Mail, declined to comment.

Hughes, however, said the law was her salvation.

‘I am so thankful I lived in North Carolina,’ she said. ‘I would hate to have been on the floor of that bathroom for three months, broken and not been able to do something about it. You become very despondent. You stay depressed, you make irrational decisions, if you didn’t have a way to kind of fix it, get your pride back. I don’t know what I would have done.

‘It got me off the floor. And got me moving again.’

Hughes, born and raised in North Carolina, was working as a flight attendant for one of the big airlines, jetting all over the world, when she met and eventually married Clayton. She was 39 and gave up her work when she fell pregnant with their first son.

‘I really wanted to be home with them, and we could afford it,’ she said. ‘He was very hardworking. He always worked in NASCAR, but he also had a wholesale car business with his father.

‘We lived beneath our means, so never in debt. We took a vacation twice a year, our house was paid for – we also had a cabin in the Uwharrie Lakes, and a rental property. We lived very comfortably, but not fancy.’

As the boys got older, Hughes slowly started working again, finding a job within NASCAR, too, as a flight attendant for one of the teams.

MORE ON THIS: Trump Calls for Ukraine to Get a New President as He Criticizes Volodymyr Zelensky

‘We both travelled for a living,’ she said. ‘He worked in NASCAR throughout our marriage. We were always on the phone. I knew where he was. I knew where he was staying. And when I was traveling for NASCAR, we would stay together – whoever had the nicer hotel. 

‘We had many great times together where we were away from the kids and could have a nice dinner and spend quality time together.’

Clayton often wrote his wife a stream of lyrical love letters and notes, dated and inscribed. They happily discussed renovating the lake cabin, with plans to spend their retirement on the water. 

The Daily Mail has reached out to Clayton Hughes and his attorney for comment.

He had worked as a spotter for NASCAR champion Martin Truex, before joining Cobb’s team. Then, Hughes claimed, things fell apart.

‘He stopped wanting me to come stay with him,’ she said. ‘He would say the hotel’s under construction. And then the next week, I’d say, “Am I going to come see you?” And he said, “well, the hotel’s under construction.” I said, “Again? Another one?”‘

In September 2020, when their sons were 12 and 16, Clayton said he wanted a separation.

Hughes asked him outright if he was having an affair with his new boss, and he denied it.

‘I knew she was having problems in her own marriage,’ said Hughes. ‘And she’s very flashy. She’s not like me at all. She does all these promotional things, talks a lot about women’s empowerment,’ she added, eyebrows raised.

Neither Cobb nor her lawyers have responded to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.

Tracey and Clayton decided to stay together until after Christmas, for the sake of their sons, but in October 2020 she found that fateful message, and immediately contacted divorce lawyers.

‘I was aware of the alienation of affection laws, but didn’t know anybody who’d ever been involved in one,’ she explained. ‘When I told my divorce attorney he might be having an affair, she said: “We’ll hire private investigators.”

‘I was scared to death to go down that road. I didn’t know what it entailed, because they wanted to put GPSs on his cars which really scared me – that made me very nervous – but that’s how you get the evidence. Even though he was having the affair, I felt like I was somehow betraying him. It’s weird, mentally, to change gears like that.’

The private investigators were careful not to share much information with Hughes, fearing she would give the game away, and she never confronted the cheating couple personally.

‘I was emotional,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t let on to my husband what they were telling me, as it would blow their surveillance and make their job very difficult. So they told me a little bit – yes, we saw them together – but not necessarily what they were doing, because I was still emotionally a mess, crying, broken, debilitated. They knew from experience not to tell me something that might really upset me, because I’d confront him. It would lose my case.’

By January 2021, Clayton filed for legal separation and moved out, and the private investigators had the evidence they needed.

By October 2021, Cobb’s husband Eddie Troconis had also evidently found out about the affair: that month he was charged with assaulting Clayton near a racetrack in Talladega, Alabama – ‘sucker punching’ him, according to Chief Deputy Josh Tubbs, and then kicking him in the back multiple times while he lay on the floor.

Troconis was sentenced to a year in prison in February 2023, local media and NASCAR sites reported. Clayton was left with significant injuries and required rehabilitation to walk again.

And when the Hugheses’ case finally came to trial, the letters and retirement plans were key for proving the sound state of the marriage, while the investigators’ files were crucial in confirming that Clayton and his boss were indeed having an affair.

The court heard from one of the private eyes who booked a hotel room next to the pair and described in toe-curling detail the sounds of their tryst.

‘People need to know that if you don’t have the evidence, you’re not going to win,’ Tracey said.

‘It’s one of the darkest places you can go – betrayal by your spouse – and it’s just so cruel and humiliating. We were in the same sport, so it was really humiliating. My passengers knew it, but I didn’t. I’m healed up now, but those were really tough days.’

‘I had $1,000 in my bank account when he left me,’ she said, worried first and foremost about her sons.

She had signed a prenup two weeks before the wedding, when she was pregnant with their first child and didn’t see any way to bargain with the document. Part of the divorce involved her suing for a greater share of their marital assets, including the three homes.

‘I was so scared I wouldn’t even have a place to live. It was during the COVID housing crisis. And I had a friend who was a realtor. We finally found a house because [Clayton] gave us a deadline to be out. I couldn’t find anything. I said to him, “I need more time.”‘

But what really inspired her, she said, was Clayton’s dismissive attitude.

‘He underestimated me,’ she said. ‘He told me I wouldn’t do anything, because, A, I didn’t have the money, and B, I was scared of her. And that really got me going.’

Cobb is currently appealing the judgement, so it is too soon for Hughes to plan how to spend the money.

Her sons are her priority, she says. Her youngest is a senior in high school, and her oldest now works as a private pilot: perhaps, she says, she will move to be closer to her siblings and mother. Hughes now is currently employed as a tour guide at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

But after the three-day trial in September in which she was awarded $850,000, her future finally looks bright, money or not.

She said: ‘I broke down in tears after the jurors left the room, because I’d been holding it in, and it had been five years. And the first thing that my lawyer said to me was: You’ve been vindicated. And I can tell you – that was better than the $850,000.

‘Because they had been going around telling everybody that they didn’t start dating until after we’d broken up. Just the audacity of that – and also telling my kids that. They were trying to make me look like a liar to my kids, like I was just out for revenge.’

And she has no regrets.

‘It kind of brought life back to me because I had a mission,’ she said.

‘It gave me a job to do, pulled me out of my grief, and I got my self-pride back. It gave me something to do where I wasn’t just rolling over and taking it.

‘I would hate to be in a state where I just had to take it and there’s nothing I could do. It empowered me. North Carolina gave me the power to do something about it.’