Roblox is fighting a wrongful death lawsuit by arguing that a girl who began using its platform at eight years old legally waived her right to a jury trial — not once, but 28 times — by clicking through its Terms of Use as a child. The case involves Audree Heine, a 13-year-old from Northern Kentucky who died by suicide in December 2024, one week after her 13th birthday. Her mother, Jaimee Seitz, is suing Roblox, Discord, and TikTok over her daughter’s death.
The legal argument Roblox is now making — that a child clicking through a terms agreement as an eight-year-old constitutes a binding waiver of her right to a public jury trial — has drawn widespread condemnation and sits at the center of one of the most disturbing corporate legal disputes to emerge in the tech and gaming space in recent years.
What the Lawsuit Actually Alleges
Seitz filed the original wrongful death lawsuit in October 2025, alleging that Audree was exposed to harmful and violent online communities through Roblox after joining the platform at age eight. According to the complaint, Audree encountered members of a community that glorified violence, self-harm, and mass shooters — including an online subculture centered on the Columbine High School attack. Those interactions, the lawsuit claims, continued and deepened on Discord.
Audree’s diary, referenced in reporting on the case, detailed the bullying she faced at school, her struggles with her mental health, and her involvement in these online communities. Seitz says she had placed parental controls on her daughter’s accounts and genuinely believed the platforms’ safety features would protect her. The lawsuit alleges those safeguards failed entirely.
TikTok was added as a defendant after the initial filing. All three companies have filed motions to dismiss the case. TikTok’s filing specifically argues that most of the complaint’s allegations “address the platform generally and do not mention Audree,” and that the platform did not “proximately cause” her death.
Roblox’s Arbitration Argument: 28 Times Over Five Years
On August 7, 2026, Roblox filed a motion to compel arbitration in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. The company’s position is that Audree and her family waived the right to a jury trial through Audree’s repeated activity on the platform from the time she was eight years old.
Roblox broke down its “28 times” claim as follows:
- One acceptance when Audree’s account was created
- Six acceptances of updated Terms of Use over the years
- Two uses or redemptions of Roblox gift cards
- Nineteen purchases of Robux, the platform’s virtual currency used to buy cosmetic items like avatar accessories
“Roblox made the Terms plain and Audree repeatedly manifested her assent,” the company’s attorneys wrote in the filing, arguing that courts have routinely upheld similar arbitration agreements in comparable cases.
If the court agrees with Roblox, the lawsuit would be moved out of a public jury trial and into private arbitration — a process critics describe as a “secret arbitration process” that resolves disputes behind closed doors with no public record and no jury of peers. Alex Walsh, an attorney representing Seitz, put the company’s motivation plainly: “They do not want the truth about how dangerous their platforms are to come out. They don’t want there to be a light shined on what they’ve done wrong and how many children have been harmed.”
The Mother’s Response
Seitz has rejected Roblox’s argument in terms that are hard to read without feeling the weight of what this family has been through. “She was a child, she didn’t understand arbitration,” Seitz said of her daughter. “She didn’t understand contracts. She didn’t understand what the little box could mean years later. But now they want a court to treat that click as though an 8-year-old knowingly negotiated away her right to have these issues heard. It’s insulting.”
The family’s lawyers had anticipated this fight before it started. The original lawsuit, filed in October 2025, explicitly states that Audree “was a minor at the time of using Defendants’ apps” and argues she therefore lacked the legal capacity to enter into a binding agreement. Seitz also formally disaffirmed any alleged contract containing an arbitration provision on behalf of her daughter’s estate — a legal step specifically designed to preempt the arbitration argument.
“If these companies believe they did nothing wrong,” Seitz said, “then they should defend it in court. Do not hide behind an agreement that an 8-year-old never understood.”
The court has not yet ruled on whether Roblox’s arbitration agreement is enforceable. Roblox’s motion is an argument, not a decision — and Seitz disputes that a contract clicked through by a child can strip her family of the right to a public trial.
Discord Is Making a Similar Argument
Roblox isn’t the only defendant trying to push the case into arbitration. Discord has filed a similar motion, claiming Audree agreed to its terms at least five times. Discord’s argument comes with an additional wrinkle: it claims Audree is partly bound by those terms because she entered an adult birthdate when registering for Discord at age eight.
That detail cuts in multiple directions. On one hand, Discord argues it points to a form of consent. On the other hand, it raises an obvious question about whether a platform that allows an eight-year-old to bypass its age requirements by entering a false birth year can then use those same terms against her family in a wrongful death case. Discord’s minimum age requirement is 13, and the company told outlets it uses technology and trained safety teams to identify and remove policy-violating content.
This Case Is One of More Than 150 Against Roblox
The Heine case is not an isolated incident in Roblox’s legal landscape — it’s one data point in a much larger wave of litigation. Roblox has been seeking to move more than 150 federal cases involving allegations of child exploitation and harm into private arbitration, making the arbitration strategy a systematic legal approach rather than a case-specific defense.
Multiple states have filed lawsuits against the company alleging insufficient oversight that exposes children to abusive or sexual content. The platform, which bills itself as a digital playground for children as young as five, has more than 100 million daily active users — and a significant proportion of those users are under 13.
Congress Is Now Watching
The scrutiny doesn’t stop at the courthouse. On August 13, 2026, Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) announced that the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism had opened a formal investigation into child safety on Roblox. The bipartisan letter sent to Roblox CEO David Baszucki was direct: “You trumpet Roblox as a safe digital playground for children as young as five. But the public record raises serious questions about this promise of safety.”
The letter cited reports of predators using Roblox’s social and chat features to groom, sexually exploit, and in some cases lure children into in-person meetings that resulted in violence. Hawley and Durbin ordered Roblox to preserve all records related to child safety, sexual or physical abuse, bullying, and financial exploitation — with documents due to the subcommittee by August 31, 2026.
The senators also cited a significant data point: Roblox submitted 65,381 reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2025 — more than double the number filed in 2024. Roblox has characterized that increase as reflecting improvements to its detection systems rather than a worsening of the problem on the platform, but the raw number is striking for a company that markets itself as a safe environment for young children.
“Let us be clear,” Hawley and Durbin wrote in their letter. “Children on your platform are hurting. Congress will not look the other way.”
The Bigger Legal Question: Can a Child Sign Away Rights?
The central issue in the arbitration fight is one with significant implications beyond this single case. Minors generally cannot enter into binding contracts under U.S. law — a long-established principle that exists precisely to protect children from agreements they don’t have the legal capacity to understand or negotiate. Roblox’s argument that 28 instances of clicking “agree” — spread across Robux purchases, gift card redemptions, and terms updates over five years — constitutes enforceable legal consent from an eight-year-old is the kind of position that legal scholars and consumer advocates will be watching closely.
If courts accept this reasoning, it sets a precedent that any child who uses a platform and clicks through its terms — even repeatedly buying small amounts of virtual currency — has effectively signed away their family’s right to a jury trial for any harm the platform causes. If courts reject it, the entire framework tech companies use to shield themselves from child-related lawsuits through arbitration clauses comes under serious pressure.
The judge in the Eastern District of Kentucky has not yet ruled. For Jaimee Seitz, the fight is personal and immediate — whether her daughter’s death will be examined in the open, in a public courtroom, or pushed into a private process the companies clearly prefer. The answer to that question may arrive before the broader legal landscape around child-platform agreements gets settled — but however it lands, this case is already one of the most consequential tech-and-children legal fights in years.
For more on online safety issues and tech accountability, check out our piece on the Twitch and Amazon class action lawsuit over AI training, or our coverage of the Pokemon TCG scam in Thailand that cost victims over $150,000.
