From the Washington Post:

A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?

The Hook, a beloved Charlottesville weekly, closed a decade ago but its archives lived on — until its 22,000 stories were suddenly taken offline in June. Former staffers have theories about its mystery buyer.

By Paul Farhi
December 14, 2022 at 10:40 a.m. EST

One day in early June, a swath of Charlottesville’s history all but vanished from the internet.

Thousands of stories reported by the Hook — a defunct local paper whose online archives nevertheless had continued to inform historians, residents and public officials — disappeared. Anyone trying to read old stories about the university town’s sagas, scandals and sundry crimes was greeted by the same error message: “Sorry!”

… But some of the Hook’s founding journalists suspect the archive didn’t simply expire from natural causes. They think someone paid to kill it.

Their evidence, while circumstantial, is intriguing. There’s the mystery buyer who purchased the Hook archive from its longtime custodian a few months before it went dark. There’s the reluctance of people involved in that sale to say much about it.

Then there’s the flurry of copyright complaints apparently filed by the new owner in the days and weeks after the sale. These complaints, seeking removal of links to the archive, have targeted news sites, discussion forums and small-time blogs, most of which cited one particular story among the thousands the Hook wrote about in its heyday: a rape accusation involving students at the University of Virginia nearly 19 years ago. …

… One of those people was Curtis N. Ofori, now a D.C.-based investment banker and accountant. Ofori was a 21-year-old junior at U-Va. in 2004, when another student accused him of raping her in her room. After an investigation, an associate dean wrote that Ofori “used very bad judgment,” but said the university “was not able to conclude at the clear and convincing level” that he committed sexual assault, so it found him “not guilty,” according to a copy of a letter detailing its findings. Police investigated, but city prosecutors declined to file charges, Ofori’s lawyer would later state in a letter to the Hook.

Susan Russell, the mother of Ofori’s accuser, nevertheless led a years-long campaign to publicize her daughter’s case, hoping it might lead to reform….

In late 2011, the Hook published a cover story by Stuart about the Russell family’s efforts, including a detailed description of the alleged rape, under a stark headline: “Unsilenced: How this mother fought to protect her daughter… and yours.” The story named Ofori as the alleged perpetrator, even though he had not been convicted or held responsible for any crime.

Ofori tried several times to have the accusations expunged from the public record. …

He also attempted to use other means to clear his name. A public database shows that, in 2011, he filed a request asking Google to stop linking to a Center for Public Integrity page containing a document prepared as part of the Russell family’s aborted legal effort; Ofori wrote in his request that it was “false” and defamatory because it was never filed in court. …

C-Ville Weekly’s principal owner, Blair Kelly, hung up on a Post reporter when first asked about the sale. But in subsequent interviews, he and Bill Chapman, a part owner of C-Ville Holdings, confirmed they sold the archive. They said they never learned the buyer’s identity, because a lawyer had acted as a go-between, but they wouldn’t provide any more details about the sale to The Post. C-Ville’s publisher, Anna Harrison, did not respond to requests for comment.

Spencer was at a loss as to why someone would want the archive taken down. But in the late summer, a longtime reader of the Hook tipped him off to another possible clue.

The tipster had noticed that, beginning in January — shortly after Spencer thinks the Hook’s archive was sold — an entity calling itself Experiential Solutions began sending takedown requests to Google, complaining that various news sites, blogs and discussion forums were infringing on the Hook’s copyrights. As catalogued on a Harvard University-hosted database called Lumen, the requests continued through late August and targeted 18 different webpages that reference alleged violent incidents at U-Va. The vast majority of the pages have one common denominator: the Ofori case.

An analysis by The Post found that 14 of the 18 targeted pages referenced Ofori, his accuser or her mother, or linked to Hook articles that did. …

Ofori did not respond to multiple phone calls or messages left at his home and the company he co-directs, Greenhall Capital Partners, an investment firm in downtown Washington.

This major story in the Washington Post doesn’t, however, include a photo of Mr. Ofori.