META- NOTE This is Part IV of an expected ten-part finale series to close out the Everett “saga” or “era” at IIT whatever that means. For Part III, see here IIT & Everett Have Agreed to Fully Part Ways. For Part V, either wait a few days or a few weeks, we’re not sure yet. The Everett Saga: It’s all planned and it’s all connected.
This is Sophia Donaldson with an urgent message to all IIT fans and readers.
I don’t know how long this post will stay up on IIT. Neither am I sure how to say this in a way you’ll believe. Well, you might not believe it anyway. And you probably shouldn’t. This is IIT.
But let’s cut to the chase.
IIT has been hijacked. It’s been hijacked for years. And it’s not just a hack. IIT has been hijacked from the inside. Jeffery Davis Sarvis secretly seized control of IIT years ago, has been secretly running the show since then, and just this past week forced our founder Everett Polinski out.
Jeff Sarvis was a nice young freshman three years ago. Or so it seemed. He was fun and brash, yet could be businesslike and respectable when he needed to be. And, oh, how he could be persuasive. He offered to help with IIT way back then in the Fall of 2020, promising to help fund the organization, to help run business matters, and help with editing so that Everett and I could focus on creating news and content. And it was nice for a while. Business boomed, traffic boomed, and IIT became known far beyond just Wyoming Catholic College. But slowly, subtlety, things changed. Jeff started making more and more decisions without talking to me, Everett, or the rest of the board. Well, sometimes he did talk to the board, but the board was made up more and more of his appointees.
We didn’t realize that anything was amiss for years. The little thing called the Infinity Incident happened and was at least a little distracting you might say. We were all still students at WCC, and there were, you might say, tensions we had to work out with each other. We were distracted.
But without our knowing it, Jeff was shadow-editing our reporting, writing all kinds of new content without our knowledge, and slowly but surely just taking over the business. The corporate takeover was effectively complete in June 2021, but we, unaware just kept writing, trusting that “good ol Jeff” was taking care of all the business matters and technical stuff we didn’t know how to do that well.
But looking back it’s all obvious; Jeff was controlling everything for his own purposes, using IIT to bolster the reputation of his business partners, using it to manipulate state and local politics, and in general wielding IIT as a political saber, contrary to our original intention of just forming a fun satire site for WCC.
Come July 2023, the site still running, and we still unaware of what had really happened, I began to realize that there was all sorts of unauthorized content on IrkutskIceTruckers.com. I told Jeff about it, asking for his help in investigating things that just didn’t feel right. I had a respectable job as an admission counselor for WCC, Everett a grounds property manager for the school, and we still ran the site, but we were starting to have enough time to notice that the site didn’t feel right.
Things were being published in Everett’s name (and my name) on the site that neither of us remembered writing and most definitely weren’t in our style. Everett was bothered about it all too, and so we wrote our August 5th article:
Jeff promised to help our investigation. But then things got weirder. I got a bunch of messages from Everett, who had left town for a few days, journeying to visit the Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma (the one associated with John Senior’s students). Weirdly, they were phone text messages, which he wasn’t supposed to be sending while visiting the monks, but they were from his phone number so I trusted them. But the weirdest part was what he said in them, that he had “agreed to part ways with IIT” bothered as he claimed to be, by the whole unauthorized article problem.
And so I wrote an article on it a few days back:
But the same day I did, literally minutes after mine was published, another article went up, written by the man Jeffery Davis Sarvis himself. This article had the exact same title, similar import as mine (Everett and IIT have agreed to part ways), but slightly different details.
Most importantly Jeff’s article in addition to saying, as mine did, that Everett was gone, blamed me for the problems I had just brought to Jeff’s attention, that IIT had been hacked or at least had a bunch of unapproved posts.
On a completely unrelated note, IIT’s editor-in-chief Sophia Donaldson has also resigned. We suspect that she may have been part of the reported epidemic of “fake news” on IIT and be behind the noted impersonation of Everett Polinski in some of our articles. Predicated on evidence I can’t disclose, we strongly believe here at the IIT board of directors that she is behind every issue we’ve ever had recently. Every SINGLE ONE. She has been replaced by Jeffery Davis Sarvis (That’s Me!!!) with assistance from Odin Odinssen.
Jeff’s statement about me
And not just that I was to blame, but that I had “resigned”, which is something I most definitely did not do. Furthermore, Jeff now claimed to be both president and editor in chief of IIT, effectively replacing me and Everett and officially claiming to be entirely in charge of the whole operation.
Immediately after this article went out, I found my access to IIT eliminated. I couldn’t log in, couldn’t contact Jeff, couldn’t get a reply from Everett, and found my IIT phone number and email suspended.
The final phase of the IIT corporate takeover had occurred. Jeff had officially assumed control. Everett and I were out and the texts “from Everett” were fake.
With Everett still gone through tomorrow at his visit to the abbey, and not responding to texts, I got help from a hacker friend to access IIT again and am now posting this an appeal, a call, to our loyal readers. Help us get back control. Protest outside Jeff’s dorm room. Protest on social media. Protest in Frassati Hall. Protest on the rooftops (well, actually don’t, but you get the idea).
Help get IIT back. Don’t let Jeff use it as a personal political tool at IIT and beyond. Help us get it back.
Copy or print this page. Jeff will likely take it down as soon as he notices that I put it up. It may only be online for minutes.
Sophia Donaldson