Disabling access for users without deleting

Is it possible to disable user access to WordPress without deleting their account?

The scenario is that we have an author who is no longer writing for us, so we’d like to disable their Clef (and thus WordPress) access, however we don’t want to delete them since that would remove their author page and change post authorship.

The only thing I can think of is creating a second “fake” author user account and reassigning all of their posts to that one, then deleting the first.

That’s kind of a wonky solution though, would prefer to simply disable their access.

We are using Clef with passwords disabled completely.

When this scenario would arise for non-Clef enabled sites, we’d simply change the user email address to an administrators and reset their password and log them out, thus blocking them from resetting the PW.