Is there really a narrative that these women fabricated stories of sexual abuse by Jacob Appelbaum because he upset some powerful entities?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum#Allegations_of...
Personally though, I think the more obvious issue in the Appelbaum case is that he was held to "trial by social media", which is a very common pattern these days. In the end, there was no legal action taken by ether Appelbaum or the women accusing him (and the veracity of some -- though not all -- of the stories was challenged by other women in the Tor community). He's now back to doing crypto-related research as a student of Bernstein and Lange (recently publishing a paper about improving WireGuard's security).
So I don't think we'll ever know if the allegations were true or not, but it probably means he won't work as a journalist (or for the Tor Project) again.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...
But also -- they didn't even write about it. They smeared him relentlessly for 7 years only to "change their tune" immediately after the point-of-no-return.
So yes -- it was a snub in the sense that it was literally the least useful form of "help" they could've given. Julian didn't need symbolic help. He needed actual help, and the Guardian left him out to dry (and then proceeded to publish countless articles smearing him -- including flat-out lying as in the "he met with Manafort" case).
Heck, WikiLeaks sent one of their lawyers to help Snowden in Hong Kong when he got in trouble (and bought him plane tickets and the rest of it -- even trying to rent a private jet to get him out of Russia while he was stuck in the airport) -- and they didn't even have anything to do with publishing the Snowden revelations.