National school portrait vendor Lifetouch this week found themselves arguing that, even if Jeffrey Epstein pal Leon Black-founded private equity firm Apollo bought their parent company Shutterfly for $2.7 billion in September 2019 after Epstein was found suicided in jail cell, there’s no reason for parents to suspect that their kids’ school pictures will somehow be acquired by a sex trafficking ring.
Seriously. “Lifetouch is not named in the Epstein files. The documents contain no allegations that Lifetouch itself was involved in, or that student photos were used in, any illicit activities,” Lifetouch Group CEO Ken Murphy wrote in a statement posted on the company website Wednesday.
Nevertheless, the AP reports that a number of schools and districts across the US this week announced picture day was canceled, specifically because of parents telling administrators they weren’t comfortable with Lifetouch. How many have canceled isn’t firm but it’s at least three and probably closer to 10. “We decided our students and families would be best served by keeping all of our pictures in-house for the rest of this year, and we are looking at all of our options for the 2026-2027 school year,” said Malakoff, Texas district spokesperson Katherine Smith in a statement.
“No Lifetouch executives have ever had any relationship or contact with Epstein and we have never shared student images with any third party, including Apollo,” said Lifetouch in another statement Friday, adding that their corrupt “Epstein class” overlords “and its funds also have no role in Lifetouch’s daily operations and have no access to student images.” Not a great sign when you need to say basically the same exact thing again a few days later like people are suddenly going to listen.
How much overlap there is with parents who “expressed concerns” over Lifetouch’s third-degree Epstein connection and those who “expressed concerns” over Critical Race Theory without actually being able to define it is not clear but proooooobably isn’t zero either. No doubt principals and administrators felt similarly when hearing from them about it this month, though at least this time they aren’t yokels appropriating Ivory Tower jargon as a permission structure to be racist.
Like the easy call here is to say “Your rural Texas teenager has only a slightly lower chance of being abducted by aliens than they do some very tenuously Epstein-connected hedge fund executive in Manhattan or Palm Beach, so you should chain their ankles to the bed posts every night. It’s a sensible precaution if you’re also going to demand that their high school cancel portrait day with some local Lifetouch contractor who does this to supplement his/her wedding photo income.”
And yet if it’s also easy to lament that local photographer getting screwed out of the job, for reasons hard to nail down while the feeling is clear, it becomes exponentially harder once you traverse up this corporate food chain. Like okay, people believe stupid bullshit they saw on the internet and that injects a terrifying level of uncertainty to your business model that rests on trust that will not easily be rebuilt. That has to be frustrating as hell to middle management at Lifetouch – founded in the 1930s and acquired by Shutterfly in 2017 before both were bought up by Apollo Global in 2019.
It’s those top two rungs where one may feel something closer to “Go fuck yourselves, seriously. You deserve this in the way few have ever deserved anything.” Shutterfly for not doing their due diligence when putting themselves up for sale to a oligarchic private equity syndicate that could and maybe will gut them/Lifetouch after a bad quarter of this and – by far most of all – Apollo Global.
Low-info Americans buying into gutter propaganda about fictitious threats to their kids was GREAT for business 2021 through 2025 when it drove them to the polls to put convicted felon President Trump and his party back into power. It was they who bailed incompetent capitalist Jared Kushner out with a $184 million loan during one of his many real estate fuckups. It was they who ordered one of their ecommerce subsidiaries to put the Trump Org’s chintzy home goods Trump.com online store back up after Shopify fired them as customers on January 7th, 2021. It is Leon Black’s son, Benjamin who the GOP-majority Senate in October confirmed as CEO to the US International Development Finance Corporation and who the fuck knows what kind of corrupt scams he’s up to these days.
Yes, Ben’s in the Epstein files too. In February 2016 he emailed Jeff’s assistant to have her commission a portrait of his father… A painted one, not a Lifetouch job. Those are for the poors.
Anyway yeah, it’s a shame that people see stuff like this on the internet…
Leon Black is not only an old friend of Trumps, the 16 year old he is accused of raping has Down syndrome. pic.twitter.com/rkFmPFCDIa
— MissPeeps (@mizzpeeps1) February 12, 2026
…and decide that they don’t want their kids’ photos next to their names and the school they go to in a database controlled by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of Apollo Global Management.
Real shame. It’s almost like the MAGA oligarchy didn’t fully anticipate that the same soil in which the flowers of Pizzagate and Moms for Liberty grooming bullshit and Tren de Aragua and all those other amygdalae stimuli blossomed so joyously could also be the habitat of the worm that turns.
May they go forth and propser upon the bones of anything and everything in Apollo’s portfolio.