USA Today reports Joseph Tokosh was recruiting students to allow him to paint their faces like clowns, sometimes in exchange for money or extra credit in his geography class at Nicholls State University.
“I thought it was a good offer because I didn’t have a job at the time. I was into makeup, special effects sort of makeup. So I thought if I could get face paint done and get paid, it sounded like a win-win,” Levan recalled. Kent State also shared a similar police report with News 5, filed a year earlier by another female student. The young woman told officers Tokosh got her phone number from another freshman Facebook group and had been contacting her over the past year asking if “she was interested in having her face painted for one of his class projects.”
She said she never reported the interaction, brushing it off as bizarre. In 2018, another graduate student in the geography department emailed her to ask about the tweet. He said another female student was approached in a “much more aggressive way,” and he was trying to determine whether the requests came from the same man.“If someone messaged me and said, ‘I want to hurt you,’ I would report that. But he didn’t,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I want to paint your face.
Several students told the “Nicholls Worth” Tokosh offered extra credit points to some who agreed to let him paint their faces. After his resignation, the university said it launched a Title IX investigation. A spokesperson says Tokosh is no longer affiliated with the school.