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Two former Lancaster Country Day School students created hundreds of artificial intelligence-generated pornographic images of dozens of classmates and other minors. Country Day is pictured here Nov. 18, 2024.
Two former Lancaster Country Day School students created hundreds of artificial intelligence-generated pornographic images of dozens of classmates and other minors. Country Day is pictured here Nov. 18, 2024.
Months after two former Lancaster Country Day students were sentenced in juvenile court for using artificial intelligence tools to create more than 350 deepfake nude images of 59 girls, thirteen of the minor victims and their parents are suing the school and AI companies in federal court. The suit also names the two students who created the images as well as their parents.
The suit claims the school, the companies that made the AI tools, and the parents of the two students who created the images all neglected to protect the 59 female students from “profound and ongoing harm” caused by the actions of two of their peers. The 41-page civil suit was filed in federal court by Nadeem Bezar, an attorney and partner at the Philadelphia-based law firm Kline & Specter.
“It’s time, like we said in the complaint, to recognize that ‘boys will be boys’ is an unacceptable position to take when we’re talking about such a personal violation of these young girls’ rights and psyche,” Bezar said Tuesday evening.
Bezar began serving as counsel for a group of the Country Day victims in November 2024 — one year after an anonymous tip was submitted to the school alerting administration to the use of AI software by one of its students to digitally morph female classmates’ faces to appear atop nude bodies.
The two perpetrators (referred to as N.S. and W.D. in the suit because they were minors when they were charged) were sentenced to probation, ordered to submit DNA samples and perform 60 hours of community service – one hour per victim – in March. Because the boys are minors, they can seek to have their juvenile records expunged if they do not commit any more crimes and satisfy the conditions of their probation.
The suit says that because the school’s administrators failed to act upon the November 2023 tip, NS and WD were able to continue creating images until a parent alerted the police in May 2024; the perpetrators created more than 350 images.
“This additional victimization was a direct and foreseeable result of LCDS’s inaction,” Bezar writes in the suit. “Had LCDS taken appropriate action when it first learned of this conduct, the additional victimization that occurred after November 2023 would never have occurred.”
Country Day Head of School Emilie Kossof, who began as the school’s top administrator in July 2025, wrote in a statement Tuesday evening that the school will be defending itself against the allegations made in the suit.
“Our focus has been, and will remain, on ensuring that our school community continues to move forward,” Kossof said. “The school’s relationship with our community is foundational to fulfilling its mission and serving students.”
Country Day is a private K-12 college-preparatory school enrolling more than 500 students, with 184 students at its upper school as of the 2025-26 school year. In the previous year, according to Pennsylvania Department of Education data, the upper school enrolled 228 students.
LCDS Suit by Ashley Stalnecker
Almost all of the more than dozen complaints lodged against the defendants in the suit allege negligence – both generally and by breaking law – by the two former student perpetrators, their parents, 10 unnamed AI companies and the school.
On the school’s part, Bezar alleges that administrators and the board not only failed to adequately report the November 2023 anonymous tip regarding the nude images and to notify law enforcement but obstructed the police investigation by “refusing to provide a school yearbook” and “failing to respond to the investigating detective’s requests.”
The suit claims administrators discouraged victims and their families from seeking assistance from law enforcement.
When questioned by parents about the school’s failure to act, former Assistant Head of Upper School Lindsay Deibler-Wallace told parents that “boys will be boys,” according to the suit.
And, per the suit, the school was negligent when it granted admission to WD midway through the school year in 2022. When WD applied, according to the suit, administrators at his previous school contacted Country Day officials and “warned them not to admit W.D. because of, among other things, a history of inappropriate behavior and academic dishonesty.”
After WD was admitted, the suit claims he was temporarily suspended after calling a gay teacher by a homophobic slur.
Country Day is additionally accused of violating Title IX, a federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination, as all victims were girls. The suit said the effects of the AI images was “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively deprived” the girls of equal access to the school’s educational opportunity.
Victims, according to the suit, suffered “severe anxiety, loss of concentration, difficulty focusing on school work, decline in academic performance, disengagement from the school environment, loss of trust in the school environment, and the persistent psychological burden of knowing that sexually explicit fabricated images of themselves existed and could resurface”
The companies that made the AI tools that WD and NS used to create the images were also negligent and are liable under both federal and state law, the suit says, because they failed to implement adequate age-verification systems and “content-moderation technology capable of detecting and blocking the generation of explicit depictions of minors.”
Bezar filed a writ of summons against Country Day in Lancaster County Court in 2024, but on Tuesday he said presenting the case in federal court is his clients’ focus.
His writ in county court followed legal action initiated by Matthew Faranda-Diedrich, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based law firm Royer Cooper Cohen Braunfeld. At the time, Faranda-Diedrich had sent a letter to the Country Day board of trustees alleging that then-Head of School Matt Micchiche failed his duty as a mandated reporter to notify authorities of suspected child abuse.
The school decided to “part ways” with Micciche, and former Board President Angela Ang-Alhadeff resigned from her role in November 2024, not long after receiving that letter.
Bezar has a history of litigating cases involving sex crimes and abuse of minors where negligence in reporting was at play. A namesake and founding partner of his firm, Tom Kline, represented a victim abused by former Penn State University football coach Jerry Sandusky.
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