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To whatever extent someone's predictable reaction is unjust, I place the blame on the person reacting in the unjustified manner. For instance, it's completely predictable that if you go around college campuses trying to use good faith debate to argue for milquetoast mainstream Christian conservative ideals, that others will react in a way that gives you the reputation as a neo-Nazi male chauvinist who wants to enslave all women and murder brown people. I place no blame on someone who does this for gaining such a reputation, because the actual responsibility lies in those who observe the former and unjustly/incorrectly/maliciously interpret it as an expression of the latter.
In this case, I place the full blame on those who read these scribblings on paper - scribblings that the author explicitly (falsely) said she invented based loosely on someone other than that man - and deciding that these made-up scribblings implied things about that real man. That decision was unjust, incorrect, maybe malicious, and I place the entirety of the blame on those who made that decision. If explicitly presenting the story as fictional and explicitly misdirecting the audience towards a false IRL inspiration is being reckless in terms of libeling the true IRL inspiration with the contents of the story, then I think that just renders the term "reckless" meaningless.
That's a fair point,. so I'll change it: if it's predictable that people would react badly towards someone else (and only someone else), particularly when it's someone you're hostile towards, you're responsible. It may be worse the more reasonable the response is, but most cases I can think of don't even need to get that far.
By your reasoning, there's no need to change any details; she could have made it exactly describe the guy and as long as she said it was fiction, it would be the fault of the people reading. By your reasoning, I could say that there's a party on your lawn this weekend and if anyone comes and messes up your lawn, I have no responsibility. In fact, I could make a false police report about you committing an actual crime and as long as I've put some details in that the police could theoretically check before arresting you, it's not my fault if you get arrested. Or if you're Jewish I could report you to the Nazis--I've only given them truthful information, it's the Nazis' fault if they then decide to kill you based on it.
You're right, it should be more nuanced, and this does break down at the edges and extremes. If I wrote a short story about someone named "Jiro" who posts on a forum called "TheMotte" and characterized him as a big stupid doo-doo-head and published somewhere that would have a lot of TheMotte users (or we were in an alternative universe where TheMotte was fairly mainstream - but then that TheMotte wouldn't be recognizably TheMotte anymore, would it?), I couldn't credibly claim that this was a completely fictional story that shouldn't be taken as a malicious smear on you. At some point, the deniability is implausible, and that is beyond that point. Even if I named the character "Gyro" on "TheMoat" website, it wouldn't be plausible.
I don't think the situation here is all that analogous. We note that multiple people who knew the man in question and read the story inferred the story was about him; we don't know how many people who didn't know that specific man and read the story inferred the story was about some other poor sap who had nothing to do with the story. We also don't know how many people knew the man in question and read the story and never connected the two. It's not clear to me that it was predictable, much less completely so, for the author that publishing this story would lead to people believing bad things about the real man.
If I were to explicitly and, in good faith, say that I'm lying when I tell others about this fictional party or file this false police report - as this author did when she said the story was fiction and doubled down on that fictional aspect when asked - then I do think the responsibility falls on the person who believes me (of course, lying on a police report is also itself a crime, but a different crime).
This one's an edge case where it's hard for me to imagine how I could lie to the Nazis, in good faith, that the truthful location of some Jew that I'm telling them is actually a lie. When some group is going around saying "we're going around looking for Xs to murder," telling them something like, "Here's a fictional story about an X living 2 blocks away in the red house with the blue door that we pass by every morning in our IRL commute" doesn't carry credibility as being just a fictional story without any basis in reality. The situation here with the story is somewhat analogous to that, but I do think the analogy breaks down due to the much more diffuse and weaker authoritarianism of the progressive/feminist/woke left during that era compared to the Nazis during the era when they were in charge in Germany.
"What is inferred by people who don't know him" is a bad standard--she could have used his real name and address and people who don't know him still wouldn't know it's about him.
And most of the harm would come from the reactions of the people who do know him, anyway.
I was thinking of the scenario where you voluntarily and directly reported a Jew to the Nazis. Under the standard "it's the fault of the person who reacts, not the fault of the person who provides the information" it wouldn't matter whether you provided the information voluntarily and directly.
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