On July 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge Wesley L. Hsu of the Central District of California issued an order in Serena Fleites v. MindGeek S.A.R.L. et al. holding that Visa must face renewed allegations that it profited from the monetization of child sexual abuse material posted to Pornhub and other sites owned by Montreal-based Aylo. AVN reported the ruling on July 15; Law360 covered it on July 11.

Why It Matters

Payment processing is the single most consequential chokepoint in the adult industry, and this case is a direct window into *why* Visa and Mastercard behave the way they do. The card networks' 2020–2021 retreat from adult platforms, Mastercard's October 2021 age-and-consent documentation rules, and the periodic wave of merchant terminations that hit legitimate sexual wellness and creator businesses are all downstream of exactly this litigation risk: the fear that a court will treat a payment network as a knowing participant rather than neutral infrastructure. Every time that theory survives a motion to dismiss, the networks' risk models tighten — and the collateral damage lands not on bad actors but on compliant adult platforms, sex toy retailers stuck with high-risk merchant codes, and independent creators who lose banking access with no recourse. The industry has spent years arguing that over-broad payment de-risking harms the people it claims to protect by pushing commerce into less accountable channels. That argument does not get easier if Visa is facing a jury on conspiracy claims. Anyone building a sextech company with card-network dependency should treat this docket as a leading indicator of the next round of merchant-policy tightening, and should have a processor contingency plan that doesn't assume Visa's appetite for adjacent risk stays constant.

The case is the long tail of Nicholas Kristof's December 2020 New York Times column "The Children of Pornhub," which used Fleites — who has said she was victimized as a young teenager — as its central narrative and set the company then known as MindGeek on a path of reorganization and rebranding. Litigation began in 2021. Fleites's lawyers have argued that MindGeek, Visa, and a class of private equity owners predating current owner Ethical Capital Partners all benefited from her victimization.

Hsu's order puts the payments layer back in the frame. The theory Visa must now answer is that it conspired to violate the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act by entering into an agreement with Aylo/MindGeek that, in the court's phrasing of the allegation, "minimizes the visibility of illegal conduct… in furtherance of unlawful acts." Hsu wrote: "Accordingly, the court finds that this allegation sufficiently demonstrates conspiracy… As this matter is before the Court at the pleading stage, the court finds that Plaintiffs have sufficiently alleged the existence of an agreement and have provided, through the aforementioned allegations, a factual basis supporting those allegations."

This is a pleading-stage ruling, not a finding of liability — the court is holding that the allegations are sufficient to proceed, not that they are true. Visa had previously won dismissal of all claims against it, arguing principally that it acted only as a remote payment network rather than a participant in the underlying conduct.

Sources

Update — 2026-07-28

Initial entry — story first created.

Update — 2026-08-05

Payments Dive's coverage on August 3, 2026 clarified — and partially complicated — the scope of Judge Hsu's July 9 order, which the outlet reviewed against the court record. Two key claims against Visa survived the motion to dismiss: the allegation under California's Unfair Competition Law and the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) claim. Hsu also rejected Visa's argument that plaintiffs lacked standing because the network didn't directly cause their injuries, writing that "Visa's conduct enabled MindGeek to monetize trafficking content and provided the financial infrastructure to sustain its operations" — quoting his own earlier opinion from four years prior.

Importantly, Payments Dive reports that Hsu dismissed the civil-conspiracy allegation with prejudice, finding "relevant defects" that "could not be fixed." That is a meaningful narrowing versus the conspiracy framing in the original coverage: Visa still must defend the case, but on the UCL and TVPRA theories rather than a standalone civil conspiracy. The case now has 33 additional plaintiffs identified as Jane Doe alongside lead plaintiff Serena Fleites, and Payments Dive notes Visa is a defendant in 14 related cases stemming from payment processing for the operator. Plaintiffs' attorney Michael Bowe of Brithem called the ruling "an important step in holding Visa accountable," arguing Visa excused MindGeek from its merchant standards "because of the volume of transactions MindGeek generated." A Visa spokesperson declined to comment.

The takeaway for the industry is unchanged in direction but sharper in detail: the surviving TVPRA and UCL claims keep alive the theory that a card network can be treated as more than neutral infrastructure — the exact litigation risk that drives the periodic tightening of adult-merchant policies and high-risk merchant coding.

New Sources