HOA Website Sabotaged by Former HOA President

Back in 2012 while I was on the Board I accepted the job of putting the HOA website together, which I successfully accomplished. I researched the domain name and website hosting options for weeks, then I designed the actual website, layout and content, and got it up and running.
The president who gave me this assignment moved and a new president filled his position.
Now, this new president not only missed the annual meeting when elections were held (she put her name in and won only due to just enough people running to fill vacant positions), then she missed the first board meeting when all of the projects and jobs were handed out. Instead of finding out what was discussed at the meeting she missed, she acted surprised and suspicious that these projects were seemingly being done without her knowledge. Yes, she is a real nut! The handwriting was on the wall from the very beginning as to what kind of president she was going to be.
Shortly after I completed the website, I left the board before my term was up because of this new presidents constant disrespect, back stabbing and the overall poor job she was doing. Upon my departure and at her request, I gave her all of the website information, ie: username and password.
As I feared, shortly after I transferred all of the usernames and passwords, etc, she got into the website and basically dismantled it. To this day, it has never been current again and no one has been able to manage it since. It is still so out of date her name is still listed as HOA president!
The president after her tried several times to get the passwords from her to get the website going again but she refuses to cooperate. She claimed she didn't have the answer to the security question, didn't have the password, etc, etc. I know, having created this website myself, that if you forget your password, you only have to click "forgot your password?" and it will go to her email address, and there is no security question that has to be answered, she's lying.

Now we have a new board and a new president yet again and we are trying to figure out how to handle this situation. Luckily, she never changed the username and password on the domain name account, so I was able to change that from her name, but I still can not get into the website.
My question is, how would you handle this situation? The homeowners paid for this domain name and website and are not even able to use it because of this one homeowners blatant sabotage.
My thought was that the new board could ask her for the information one more time and if she doesn't cooperate, then send her a certified letter threatening legal action if she doesn't cooperate.
Thanks for any suggestions.

I have built numerous websites for HOA's and businesses and as long as you have access to the domain and hosting, just build a new site. Hopefully you have copies of the pages you put on before. I put up HOA websites in a day and I am no expert. The past is the past, time to move forward.

As long as you control the domain name and hosting, the new website will overwrite the existing one and there will be no confusing as long as you copy everything as is.

Kathy

Do you have access to the hosting service?

Once you have rebuilt the website, you can contact your hosting service to flush out the old website before installing the new website. Yes, you can still use the same hosting service.

What is also available is if you have a .com site you can see if .org is available purchase that domain name and install a clean copy of the website on the .org site. Then re-direct or point the .com to the .org. The old website will no longer exist.

My recommendation is purchase a .org (that is the most common extension for a HOA, as it is an organization). The annual price is about $15.00 and cheaper for multi-years. Point the old domain name to the new one and the old website goes away. Whoever has the website can always put it back up, but under a different domain address. This is the less stress way of doing it.

It's possible that a letter to the webmaster from the board could give the webmaster the authority to give you access to the webpage you set up. If we are able to do that with changing the people on the HOA's bank account, it seems plausible here. It's not like your site has high security information on it right? Have you called the webmaster yet?