Adultery is a crime in New York. When Timothy Tippins tells his law students that, the reaction is always the same.
“Everybody’s shocked,” said Tippins, a matrimonial attorney who teaches a class at Albany Law School. “It absolutely runs counter to everything that exists in our culture today. People just wouldn’t believe it.”
For the last 117 years, adultery has had a spot in New York’s penal code as a class B misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail. But that may not be the case for much longer.
A bill that would repeal the state’s adultery law is in a pile of more than 500 pieces of legislation awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature before the end of the year, after state lawmakers overwhelmingly passed it in the spring.
And while the governor has yet to indicate her intentions, both of the bill’s main sponsors believe she’ll sign it into law. That would make New York the latest in a string of states to repeal the crime, which is rarely charged and even more rarely results in a conviction.
“I never want to presume what the governor will do on anything, but I would find it extremely surprising if the governor had a problem with signing this bill,” said state Sen. Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat who sponsored the legislation in the state Senate.
New York is one of 17 states that still consider adultery a crime, at least on paper. It’s the second most populous state on the list, just behind Florida.
New York’s law applies if someone “engages in sexual intercourse with another person at a time when he has a living spouse, or the other person has a living spouse.”
Since 2015, at least four states have repealed their adultery laws. That includes Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Walz — now the Democratic vice presidential nominee — signed an omnibus bill that got rid of his state’s version.
The New York law is seldom enforced. Since 1979, only 10 people statewide have faced adultery as their highest-level charge in a given case, according to the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, which tracks crime data. The agency said the number does not include cases where a defendant is also facing charges for a more severe crime.
The last known time New York’s adultery law was invoked was in 2010, when authorities said a 41-year-old woman was caught in a sex act with a man in a park in Batavia, a small city between Rochester and Buffalo.
The woman was charged with adultery and public lewdness, but when she pleaded guilty to the latter, the adultery charge was dropped. The man was also charged with public lewdness, but didn’t face an adultery charge.
The case garnered national and even international attention, branding the woman with what her attorney Brian Degnan calls a “scarlet A.” When she wound up back in the news after a new set of unrelated charges, articles always made sure to note she was the woman once charged with adultery.
Degnan said he first learned adultery was a crime in New York in 2004 — as Tippins’ student at Albany Law School. He’s among the many attorneys who believe the crime should be repealed.
“It raises so many, so many privacy questions that it’s insanity,” he said. “It could really make your head explode sitting here thinking about them.”
Tippins said he believes the reason New York’s adultery law has remained on the books is simple: politics.
“You don’t want to be the politician who introduces the bill that adultery should not be criminal,” he said. “Because the next time you run, somebody is going to use that against you, saying that you’re pro-adultery and you’re anti-family and all. I assume that was why it went all those years with nobody doing it.”
Assemblymember Charles Lavine, a Long Island Democrat, led the push to pass the bill. He picked up the effort from former Manhattan Assemblymember Dan Quart, a Democrat who left the chamber in 2022. Krueger soon signed on to the effort.
Treating adultery as a crime amounts to “punishing consensual behavior amongst adults,” Lavine said.
“I had always thought that it was nothing more and nothing less than an exercise in hypocrisy to make this unlawful,” he said.
The bill has drawn little pushback from opponents.
The New York State Catholic Conference, which represents Catholic dioceses across the state, has not taken a position on the matter.
“Adultery is a serious sin, but there are many sins that are not civil crimes,” said Dennis Poust, the conference’s executive director. “This would seem to me to fall into that category.”
But the influential Catholic League, an organization dedicated to defending Catholics, wants Hochul to veto the measure. The league’s longtime President Bill Donohue said he believes that if Hochul signs the bill, lawmakers will soon turn their attention to repealing crimes like prostitution, which his organization opposes.
“I don’t think it sends the right signal,” Donohue said. “We’re doing fine without making [adultery] legal. I just think that prostitution clearly will be the next step, and maybe that’s what they want.”
Krueger had a simple response to those who push the slippery slope argument: “They’re wrong.”
She said people said the same thing when New York became the last state in the nation to legalize no-fault divorce in 2009.
“And they were wrong on that as well,” she said.
When asked for comment on the pending bill, Hochul spokesperson Avi Small didn’t tip the governor’s hand.
“Gov. Hochul will review the legislation, as she does all bills that pass the Senate and Assembly,” he said.
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the last known time when New York’s adultery law was used.