Disney Star Peyton Clark’s dad accused of grooming underage girls

Rich Clark, 52, who is the father of Disney actor Peyton Clark and influencer Acacia Kersey has been accused of grooming teenagers, using his child photography business to get alone time with young girls in order to pressure them into taking risqué and explicit photos, several sources told The Daily Beast.

The father-of-four still runs his business in Los Angeles, touting 27 years of experience, and has an online portfolio consisting of numerous pictures of girls and young women, multiple in suggestive poses.

One of the first to go public with her accusations was Brittni Kristine, a cosmetician who is now 26 but dated Clark’s son Payton when she was a teenager in 2013. She shared a number of her text exchanges with Clark from that year in a TikTok video.

In one exchange, he says, “I love 14-year-olds as you know,” to which she replied, “You’re not supposed to admit that.’ Clark texted back, “No, I’m not supposed to act on it. I can think it and want it all I want.” 

Irene Kaia, now 23, also shared a video on YouTube sharing her alleged experience with Clark when she was 15 and 16. She discussed how she moved to Los Angeles after her father died and, as an aspiring actress.  Kaia hired Clark to take some pictures of her.

She bonded with him and eventually told him about her father, which, she said, he ultimately used against her.

“He told me that he’d be my surrogate father and watch over me and just treat me like I was his daughter,” she said. “So at the time I was 16, grieving over my dad, that meant a lot to me. So, therefore, I put my trust in him and everything he told me to do.”

She continued, “The more we shot, the more he would ask for unprofessional poses and sexual poses … and every time I would question him, he would manipulate me, but I didn’t realize that at the time. He would say to trust him, to trust your surrogate father, in that he would never put me in harm’s way. So I did, so I trusted him.”

Clark’s son Peyton, 27, starred on the Disney Channel series I Didn’t Do It in 2014 and his daughter Acacia Kersey, 24, amassed millions of followers on social media, starting on Tumblr before moving to YouTube, Instagram and now the artist-centric app Patreon.