College professor with clown fetish’ asked to paint students’ faces for cash, extra credit

This was not a romantic jester.

A former college geography professor with an apparent clown fetish resigned earlier this year after it was revealed he asked female students to paint their faces, according to a report.

Joseph Tokosh had held positions at two previous colleges and was on track for tenure at Nicholls University in Louisiana before the student newspaper exposed his creepy behavior in March, according to USA Today. Tokosh quit the same day the article was published.

The professor had not been secretive about his sexual fantasies before the report, posting about face painting and clowning on social media.

“I have a facepaint fetish and convince the cute girls in my classes to let me paint their faces,” he once posted on Reddit.

Tokosh held open discussions about his fetish online, joining Facebook groups for new students and posting videos on YouTube.

In one Reddit thread of purported hard-to-believe stories, he posted pictures of several women in white face paint, according to the newspaper.

Throughout his career in academia, he had been reported to campus police twice and other students complained about him online — raising concern about universities’ background check protocol when hiring staff members. 

Sophie Levan first encountered Tokosh, then 28, in a Facebook group incoming at Kent State — where he previously was employed — in 2017. Tokosh, who received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was hired by the school in 2015.

Tokosh offered cash to any student willing to let him paint their faces. 

“If anyone is looking for some extra cash, I am looking for people to practice facepainting on!” he wrote. “I will literally pay you!”

Levan, then 18, accepted, enticed by the cash and her own interest in movie makeup, she told USA Today.

Things quickly turned creepy. Levan, who revealed he was still a graduate student, said he asked if he could pick her up at her dorm and take her to the campus building where the geography department was located where he would paint her face.

Feeling uneasy, she refused — and Tokosh became aggressive. After she stopped responding to his incessant requests she participate, she filed a police report with the Kent State police in January 2018. 

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

Levan said she was told to cease communications with Tokosh and to let them know if anything significant happened.

Months later, around midnight, she suddenly received a text of a selfie of Tokosh’s sad-looking face covered in white face. While there was no message, his shirt read “I’m not a failure.”

“There was some negative intention with sending that photo,” Levan said. “It’s definitely burned into my mind.”

Police had received a near-identical report from another student before Levan filed her report against Tokosh.

“She does not have any concerns for her safety, but just wanted this documented,” police noted in the report, obtained by USA Today.

In July 2017, another student retweeted a message from Kent State’s Twitter account that asked for Kent State love stories: “A geography professor requested me on Facebook and asked if he could paint my face like a clown.”

When contacted by the outlet, the student said she believed Tokoksh found her on a freshman Facebook page where she posted often. She now wishes she filed a police report, too.

Tokosh ultimately left Kent State not because of the creepy advances, but after pleading no contest to entering his peers’ offices without permission and taking a USB drive, according to USA Today.

But the clowning around didn’t stop when he started his new gigs at Northern Illinois State and Nicholls State in 2022, despite many of his social media postings online before his hire.

Student journalists with the Nicholls Worth discovered that “Joeography” — a word he’d use to promote his class materials — was also the username of a Reddit user who posted about his “clown fetish” and photos of women with their faces painted.

Additionally, a YouTube account under the name “Joe Tokosh” posted at least two videos in 2020 of a man throwing pies at women — including a young woman also seen in the screenshots from Tokosh’s Reddit account. 

Nicholls Worth’s editor-in-chief Sally-Anne Torres interviewed six female students who shared their experiences with Tokosh. Some said they agreed in exchange for extra credit. The women said he sometimes giggled as they painted their faces in his office.

“It wasn’t just this innocent thing that a lot of these girls thought it was,” Torres said. “As a professor or teacher, that is somebody students are supposed to trust. He used his power to ruin that trust and to do these things, and that made me angry for them.”

The student paper published a story headlined, “Geography professor suspended immediately, students allege sexual harassment” on March 27. 

When student reporters from the campus TV station confronted Tokosh, he told students that face painting was required for his geography class to better understand other cultures.

“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,” he said.

That same day, Tokosh submitted his resignation, although he had already been let go by the university for undisclosed reasons in February.

After the report, more students came forward to share their uncomfortable experiences, according to USA Today. He has not been charged with any crimes related to the face-painting.

Tokosh has refused to respond to any requests for comment.