The Indiana attorney general is suing the parent company of Pornhub for allegedly violating Indiana’s age verification laws and misleading consumers about the pornography on its websites.
On Monday, the office of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced that he filed a lawsuit against Aylo — the parent company of Pornhub — on Dec. 3, alleging that Aylo did not comply with the 2024 law passed by the Indiana General Assembly requiring that pornographic websites verify the age of visitors.
“The content made available to children by the defendants — all of whom are associated with a multinational pornographic conglomerate known as Aylo — includes sexual violence, choking, rape fantasies, sex slavery and sex with teen girls,” a press release from Rokita’s office announcing the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit also accuses Aylo of violating the Indiana Deceptive Consumer Sales Act by “making false and misleading statements regarding the accessibility of the pornographic websites by Indiana residents” and misrepresenting its efforts to eliminate child pornography and non-consensual material from its website.
According to the lawsuit, from 2020 to 2023, Aylo “allowed the upload of at least eleven million videos and photos without verifying the identities and consent of all the individuals” in the pornographic content. All the while, Aylo definitively asserted that there was “‘zero’ underage content” on their sites — even though there were “thousands of reports” of child pornography on Pornhub annually.
Formerly known as MindGeek, Aylo owns several of the largest pornography sites, including Pornhub. Notably, in 2019, Pornhub reported 1.36 million hours of new content, which is the equivalent of 169 years of pornography, the suit said.
Pornhub told the public that it had “completely disable[d] access to our website[s] in Indiana,” according to the suit. However, the suit continued, Pornhub “publicly admitted” to being aware that their content was still accessible through “Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), proxies, and location spoofing software.”
“We know for a fact, from years of research, that adolescent exposure to pornography carries severe physical and psychological harms,” Rokita said in a statement. “It makes boys more likely to perpetrate sexual violence and girls more likely to be sexually victimized. Yet, despite such realities, these defendants seem intent on peddling their pornographic perversions to Hoosier kids.”
After Indiana’s General Assembly passed the age verification law in 2024, a group of pornography distributors, including Aylo, along with the Free Speech Coalition, sued Indiana over the requirements, which the plaintiffs alleged violated the First Amendment. Although a judge initially blocked enforcement of the law in June of that year, a federal court of appeals stayed this decision in August. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court upheld a “functionally identical” 2023 Texas age verification law in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton.
In his opinion in that ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas declared, “The First Amendment leaves undisturbed States’ traditional power to prevent minors from accessing speech that is obscene from their perspective.”
The lawsuit filed by Rokita asks that the courts force Aylo to implement reasonable age verification measures and pay civil penalties to the state of Indiana.
Aylo said it is currently not able to “comment on ongoing litigation” “out of respect for the integrity of court proceedings,” according to NBC affiliate WTHR.
Bradley Haley is a George Washington Fellow at Hillsdale College, and the Founder of New Guard Press.
