‘Clown Fetish’ Professor Convinced Students to Let Him Paint Their Faces, Then Bragged About It on Social Media: Report

After a professor at Nicholls State University resigned amid allegations that he had been using his students to indulge in his face-paint fetish, a deep-dive into his social media revealed that he had bragged about it and shared news of his activities regularly on social media.

Joseph Tokosh, a geography professor at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, was on the tenure track when student journalists exposed his behavior.

He resigned the same day their story was published.

As reported by USA Today, Tokosh detailed his fetish in both mainstream and custom online spaces.

He would post in Facebook groups geared toward new students, saying he would pay girls just to let him paint their face. The professor also posted to niche forums on Reddit, and uploaded twisted videos to YouTube.

“I have a face-paint fetish and convince the cute girls in my classes to let me paint their faces,” he once bragged on social media.

All posts from Tokosh’s alleged Reddit account, Joeography, have since been removed from the platform.

Videos of a woman getting a pie thrown at her posted to a YouTube account under the name “Joe Tokosh” in 2020 received more than 30,000 views. USA Today said the videos were taken down in late July, around the same time that they said their reporters reached out to Tokosh.

Two students eported Tokosh to police after finding his behavior obsessive or creepy.

One of them was Sophie Levan, who was a freshman at Kent State University in 2017 when she came across Tokosh in a Facebook group. Tokosh, 28 at the time, was offering to pay anyone to let him paint their faces.

Tokosh texted Levan, who was then 18, that he could pick her up and take her to the geography building. But she said she became increasingly uneasy and stopped responding.

She then said that Tokosh began texting her excessively and angrily so she filed a police report.

“I felt like the school would want to know about it,” Levan told USA Today. “I thought maybe they could prevent anything bad from happening since other girls would go with him.”

Tokosh’s time as a student and as an instructor was not listed in his LinkedIn profile.

By the time the student newspaper The Nicholls Worth published its article, Tokosh had already been let go by the university.

He claimed that he was the target of a “grade inflation task force." But university spokesperson Jerad David said that the institution “does not have any such task force.” 

Tokosh told the student-run television station KNSU TV that the face paint was allegedly part of an assignment for his cultural geography class.

“That's an assignment in one of my classes where they actually come up with their own face paint and makeup design inspired by a culture and they implement it,” Tokosh told KNSU TV.

Tokosh left his job at Kent State after he was accused of allegedly entering a colleague's office without permission and stealing a USB drive. He has not been charged for any other crimes.