Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has filed a lawsuit against several pornographic website operators for allegedly violating the state’s age verification law, the attorney general’s office announced Monday.
A complaint was filed against Aylo, an adult entertainment company that owns several pornographic websites, including Pornhub, in the Marion Superior Court on Dec. 3. The complaint alleged that Aylo and its subsidiaries have failed to implement a reasonable age verification method for its websites.
“We know for a fact, from years of research, that adolescent exposure to pornography carries severe physical and psychological harms,” Rokita said in a released 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.”
Aylo stated its policy is not to comment on ongoing litigation.
“We look forward to the facts being fully and fairly aired in that forum,” a company spokesperson said in email to The Indiana Lawyer.
In March 2024, Indiana’s age verification act was signed into law and was set to become effective on July 1, 2024. The law provides that an adult-oriented website operator must have a “reasonable” age verification method to prevent a minor from accessing the website.
But in June 2024, a group of plaintiffs, including various Aylo subsidiaries, sued Rokita to enjoin the enforcement of the age verification law, in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Rokita.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana granted a preliminary injunction, temporarily preventing the law’s enforcement. On Aug. 16, 2024, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the injunction, pending a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a similar lawsuit stemming from Texas’s age verification law.
On June 27, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in favor of the Texas attorney general in Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton, saying the Texas law—which requires any website whose content is 1/3 or more to be considered “harmful to minors” to verify the age of each of its users before providing access to the material—commits only intermediate scrutiny and is constitutional because it imposes an incidental burden on adults’ protected speech while also serving the state’s interests in shielding children from, what it considers to be, harmful content.
Following the Paxton decision, the 7th Circuit reversed and vacated the preliminary injunction against Indiana’s age verification law, and remanded the case back to the Southern District, which later granted an Aylo Freesites and Aylo Premium motion for voluntary dismissal with prejudice for all of its claims in Free Speech Coalition v. Rokita.
Rokita now maintains that, notwithstanding the 7th Circuit’s ruling that Indiana’s law has been fully enforceable since Aug. 16, 2024, his office became aware of “Aylo’s failure to implement reasonable age verification methods” in July this year.
According to the complaint, earlier this year, investigators employed by the attorney general’s office accessed several of Aylo’s owned and operated pornographic websites from Indiana while using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) with a Chicago IP address.
The investigator discovered that the websites “lacked any reasonable form of age verification to prevent minors” from accessing the website’s material, and the only age verification method the sites used was a box asking the user to confirm whether they were eighteen years old, the complaint stated.
VPNs, which are used for data privacy and security, can hide a user’s IP address (like a digital home address) to prevent websites, advertisers and other third parties from identifying and tracking users.
But the use of a VPN allegedly allowed the investigators the ability to bypass the website’s age verification window and view numerous pornographic videos.
“These restrictions based on IP address, which only apply to IP addresses in states like Indiana with age-verification laws, are unreliable and do not prevent minors in Indiana from accessing sexually explicit material,” the complaint stated.
The lawsuit also alleges that Aylo and its subsidiaries have violated the Indiana Deceptive Consumer Sales Act for misleading Hoosier consumers about the companies’ efforts to limit child-sex abuse material and nonconsensual material on its websites.
Indiana has demanded a trial by jury.
The case is State of Indiana v. Aylo Freesites Ltd., Aylo Group Ltd., Aylo Premium Ltd.et al (49D05-2512-PL-057061).
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.