On August 15, 2026, XBIZ reported that Aylo — the company formerly known as MindGeek and parent of Pornhub — has agreed to terms to settle two long-running class-action lawsuits alleging it knowingly allowed and profited from child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on its sites. The proposed agreement, filed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, seeks preliminary approval and would resolve two of the most consequential legal threats hanging over the platform.

Why It Matters

A $120 million payout is a landmark number for the adult-platform industry and a marker of how expensive the "Children of Pornhub" legacy has become for Aylo, which still faces additional litigation and, separately, a federal ruling that revived claims Visa conspired to monetize CSAM through the platform. The settlement's operational commitments — codified age verification, CSAM detection, consent-withdrawal workflows — effectively bake into a court agreement the trust-and-safety architecture that regulators (the EU's DSA, the U.S. TAKE IT DOWN Act, UK Ofcom) are already forcing across the sector, setting a de facto compliance baseline competitors will be measured against. For Ethical Capital Partners, clearing two certified class actions removes a major overhang on the business it bought in 2023, even as the no-admission-of-wrongdoing framing preserves Aylo's Section 230 arguments for future fights.

Both cases — Jane Doe v. MindGeek USA Inc. et al. and Doe #1 et al. v. MG Freesites LTD et al. — trace back to Nicholas Kristof's influential 2020 New York Times exposé "The Children of Pornhub," which alleged deficient content-moderation practices and became a rallying point for anti-pornography groups. U.S. district courts had granted class certification covering anyone who was under 18 when they appeared in a video or image viewable on any MindGeek website starting in February 2011 — a potentially enormous class. After a period of mediation, the parties signed a term sheet in June 2026 and finalized the joint settlement now before the court.

Under the proposed terms, Aylo makes no concession of wrongdoing and no admission regarding whether it is entitled to immunity under Section 230. It does, however, agree to pay $120 million into a settlement fund over six years and to implement a slate of enumerated safety measures: verifying the ages of uploaders and people appearing in content, detecting and removing suspected or actual CSAM, and expanding procedures for content-removal requests, withdrawal-of-consent requests, and content flagging. Aylo notes it has already implemented many of these measures — and stated that as of June 30, 2025, any content that did not meet its performer-verification standards had been disabled and removed from Pornhub. The company was acquired by Ethical Capital Partners in 2023 and rebranded from MindGeek to Aylo as part of a stated transparency campaign.

Sources

Update — 2026-08-16

Initial entry — story first created.

Update — 2026-10-09

Ireland shows how far the settlement reaches. On October 7, 2026, Ireland's High Court adjourned until March 2027 a parallel case brought by a U.S. woman identified as "Jane Doe" against Aylo/MindGeek group companies. Her counsel told Mr Justice Brian Cregan that the plaintiff was waiting for U.S. court approval of the $120 million (about €105.5 million) class settlement covered above. The woman alleges that video of her abuse as a minor in Alabama was posted to sites in the group. She filed in Ireland last year because of the group's international structure, aiming to preserve assets there while the U.S. litigation continues. The allegations are denied, and Aylo says the settlement involves no admission of wrongdoing.

Why it matters. This is the first sign we've seen that the U.S. deal is shaping litigation outside the U.S. Plaintiffs are waiting on its approval rather than pursuing parallel claims against assets abroad. TheJournal.ie reports that the proposed settlement would resolve the class actions brought in Alabama and California. It still needs court approval, and the March date in Dublin works as an informal deadline: if U.S. approval stalls, the Irish proceedings come back.

New Sources