A charter school inArizonascrapped picture day this week. No rain delay. No scheduling clash. Parents had traced the ownership of the company behind their children's school photos back to a name in the Jeffrey Epstein files, and that was that.
Lifetouch photographs roughly 25 million students a year across more than 50,000 American schools. And it is now fielding questions that no amount of corporate messaging was built to handle.
The chain runs like this. Shutterfly bought Lifetouch in 2018 for $825 million (£668 million). Apollo Global Management then acquired Shutterfly in 2019 for $2.7 billion (£2.2 billion). Apollo's co-founder isLeon Black. Black, according to an investigation commissioned by Apollo itself, paid Epstein $158 million (£128 million) between 2012 and 2017 for tax and estate planning advice,per CNBC.
Black resigned as Apollo's CEO and chairman in 2021 after those payments went public. The connection to any individual school photographer is about as indirect as corporate ownership gets. Parents scrolling through the Epstein document dump did not care.
MaKallie Gann, a Texas mother of four, did not wait for her district to act. 'We're just basically having these big companies that have all of our children's information where we don't really know what they're doing with it,' she told theHouston Chronicle.
Prescott Valley Charter School in Arizona cancelled outright, telling parents its 'highest responsibility is always the safety, security, and trust of our families,'HuffPost reported. Clifton Public Schools inNew Jerseystopped short of cancelling but opened a formal review. 'No evidence has been presented indicating misconduct,' the district told families. 'Nevertheless, we believe it is appropriate to review the matter carefully and transparently.'
Others looked into it and moved on. Weber County School District in Utah investigated and kept its contract, with a spokespersontelling local pressthe connection was 'far removed' from anything touching the company's day-to-day work in local schools.
Ken Murphy was blunt. Lifetouch's CEO posted apublic statementcalling the panic a 'sea of misinformation.' The company has never shared student images with any third party, he said. Apollo has no operational role, and nobody there has ever had access to student photographs.
'Lifetouch is not named in the Epstein files,' Murphy wrote. 'The documents contain no allegations that Lifetouch itself was involved in, or that student photos were used in, any illicit activities.'
He stressed that Lifetouch complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, was the first school photography firm to sign a voluntary privacy pledge, and does not licence images for AI training or facial recognition.
Source: International Business Times UK
