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What Parents Say Pepsi Knew

• A former Pepsi vendor was convicted on 118 counts of sexual exploitation of children after investigators found AI-altered sexual images and videos involving minors.
• Parents allege Pepsi returned Ronald Richardson to a school vending route even after students complained that he was secretly photographing them.
• The criminal case is finished at the trial level, but the civil lawsuit could now determine whether corporate negligence helped give Richardson continued access to his victims.

By Samuel López | USA Herald

A civil lawsuit filed in Georgia accuses PepsiCo of negligence, saying the company failed to protect students from a vending machine vendor who photographed middle and high school girls and then used AI tools to alter the images into sexually explicit material.

The vendor, Ronald Richardson, then 48, serviced drink machines at Gilmer High School in Ellijay, Georgia. According to court records and reporting from CBS Atlanta and other Georgia outlets, the case began in December 2024, when a student told a school resource officer that Richardson had asked her, through a social media app, to send him photos — a request she found inappropriate. She said Richardson had talked with her regularly over the past year while restocking machines and had often given her free drinks.

That report set off an investigation by the Gilmer County Sheriff's Office. Deputies arrested Richardson in January 2025 and searched his home, car and devices. What they found went well beyond a single student's complaint: hundreds of images and videos of child sexual abuse material, including altered photos of minors deputies recognized from their own community. Investigators said Richardson had pulled ordinary photos from students' social media accounts and run them through AI tools to make the children appear nude or, in some instances, depicted in sexual acts.

Sheriff Stacy Nicholson said at the time it was the first case in his office's history where AI had played a role in a child exploitation investigation. He predicted it wouldn't be the last.

The scope of the case grew substantially over the following months. An initial 76-count indictment in Gilmer County expanded to 120 counts by July 2025, and the case was eventually transferred to the DeKalb County District Attorney's Office as a conflict prosecutor. Investigators ultimately identified more than 150 minor victims, some located outside Georgia. In August 2026, a judge convicted Richardson on 118 counts of sexual exploitation of children. He was sentenced this month to 40 years in prison, though prosecutors noted the charges carried a theoretical maximum well over 2,000 years.

The new lawsuit against Pepsi centers on a narrower question: whether the company bears responsibility for placing Richardson on a school campus in the first place. Vendors working on Georgia school grounds are typically required to pass a background check and be screened against a sex offender registry. Gilmer County School System officials have said they would cooperate with any findings that could change how the district vets vendors going forward, without publicly detailing what allowed Richardson's conduct to go undetected for as long as it did.

Pepsi has not yet filed a public response to the negligence claims.

The lawsuit adds Pepsi to a small but growing list of companies facing civil liability tied to AI-generated child sexual abuse material — a legal area that is still developing as courts work out how existing negligence and product-liability frameworks apply to harms enabled by generative AI tools that didn't exist when much of the underlying law was written.

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