Your story is worse but I hade one kinda similar. We have a guy that is normally 10-15 minutes late. Not a huge deal for us. We’re all friends outside of DnD and he’s there within reason but he’s the most likely to bow out and force a cancel.
Our DM confirms a week out then the couple days leading up. He’s late and I ask “what’s up?” In discord. He replies “I’m having an issue” with no follow up. We wait 20 minutes then I ask if we should call it and he said yes so we didn’t play after sitting there for an hour.
I talked with a mutual friend and she said he was fighting with his wife that night. I get that shit like that happens but it seems really reasonable to me to just say tonight’s not the night early and not make us wait an hour
Is behavior is crazy and dumb. He could lie about not thinking it’s unreasonable but accusing Christian of blackmail has just fueled this fire