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My model of this situation diverges from yours, primarily on the axis of how much outrage is warranted. While I see the chain of events you lay out, my conclusion is less one of a great ethical transgression and more of a messy, unfortunate situation amplified by the strange dynamics of viral internet fame.
Addressing the most serious charge, that the story contributed to the man's death: My confidence in this causal link is very low. He died three years after the story was published. While I don't deny that seeing a distorted and unflattering version of yourself become a cultural touchstone would be profoundly unpleasant and mentally taxing, a three year gap suggests the presence of more immediate and powerful intervening factors. To attribute a suicide (if that is what it was) to a short story from years prior seems like a stretch. It may have been a weight on the scale, but it seems unlikely to have been the one that tipped it.
Second, I find it difficult to be maximally outraged at the author for her actions. Let's consider her position. She writes a story loosely based on a person she briefly knew, changing most of the key details of the interaction to fit her fictional narrative. When the story unexpectedly goes viral, she is faced with a choice. Option A is to say, "Yes, this is based on a real person, here is his name, let's all go scrutinize his life." Option B is to say, "No, this is a work of fiction that I invented."
(Neither is correct, by itself, the truth lies somewhere in between)
Given that her fictionalized version painted the man in a negative light, Option A would have been disastrous for the poor bastard. It would have directly attached his name and identity to the despised character of "Robert" . By insisting the story was purely fictional, she was, in a strange way, providing him with a shield. It allowed him and anyone who knew him to say, "This isn't me, this is just some character a writer made up." This seems like the correct action from a harm reduction standpoint, even if it involves a public falsehood. The real mistake, as she later admitted, was including enough specific biographical data (the town, the movie theater) to make the connection in the first place. That was a failure of foresight, but it feels more like carelessness than malice.
Third, my own reading of the story is that it is a decent but flawed piece of fiction that perfectly captured a specific cultural moment. Its strength is in the depiction of internal female monologue, the cascade of small anxieties, and the way a person can build up a fantasy of another that inevitably collapses on contact with reality. Or, as the younglings would say these days, how a woman can suddenly catch the "ick". The story's major weakness, and the part that feels like a narrative cheat, is the final text message. Up until that point, Robert is ambiguous. He's awkward, perhaps a bit pushy, maybe a little insecure, but not monstrous. You could read him as a basically decent guy having a bad night. The single word "whore" resolves all that ambiguity. It flattens his character into a simple villain and retroactively validates all of Margot's anxieties. To me, it's the part of the story that feels most like a concession to a pre-existing political narrative rather than a believable character choice.
None of the elements are implausible in isolation, since men can be overweight, socially anxious, overly aggressive during courtship (while missing better opportunities), bad in bed and can, yes, get angry after rejection. Of course, to specifically highlight all these flaws is a choice that demonstrates a certain political framing, but this is a tier above average gender-war slop.
Finally, the practice of authors drawing from real life is not just common; it's damn near universal. Hell, I do that all the time myself, and nobody told me to seek IRB clearance. Writers are observers, and they use the material of their lives and the lives of those around them. The expectation that a writer must get signed consent from every person who serves as a sliver of inspiration for a character seems unworkable. The issue here isn't the act of inspiration itself, but its collision with a moment of intense online polarization and the story's viral reach. Nobody could really have predicted that, especially without the benefit of hindsight. Not even the author.
So, I do not see a villain here. I see a writer who made a careless mistake with sourcing details, who then tried to manage the fallout in a way that minimized harm to the real people involved, and whose story became a cultural symbol far beyond its literary merits. Sure, we can look at it as a cautionary tale about virality and the blurry line between art and life, but I just can't bring myself to see it as a major ethical failure that demands outrage.
I probably end up thinking more like you on this, but to try and steelman BahRamYou's point, you have to take into account what was the likely mindset the story was written with. It's from the #MeToo era, written by a lesbian writer, in The New Yorker, and it depicts a man as a villain, in a way that even seems to go against most of the story itself. What are the chances that Roupenian thought: "that's what men are truly like, they're children who become nasty and wound you when you don't want to have (more) sex with them"? I think it's quite possible. It's also possible she didn't think so and just wrote the story that wanted to write itself using random details of a relationship she heard before, and despite harbouring no ill will towards men in general decided right at the end to turn the guy into a total asshole. Maybe she thought it would help the story get picked up, or maybe she just made a bad writing decision, or maybe I'm wrong and in decades we'll be looking back at this story and decide she made the best literary choice by doing this heel-turn. We'll likely never know because it's not quite as fashionable to admit having this kind of prejudice against men now as it was when the story was written. But it's almost impossible for me to think that it's not the reason The New Yorker picked it up. If prejudice against men was intended, it does make the revelation that it's based on a story where the man wasn't at all like that seem intellectually dishonest. Prejudice can be understood and forgiven if it's driven by experience or ignorance, but it's much harder to explain and forgive if the person did actually know better.
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From the description, she didn't change the key details. The details that identify him were kept. The details that she changed were the ones that now said that he did horrible things.
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In November 2020. When other things were going on.
(Or given the description of "died suddenly", maybe he was in the experimental arm of the mRNA trials)
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