I have never myself heard that narrative about Appelbaum. It seems clear that, while some of the allegations against him were unfounded, others were made by women who publicly identified themselves and their experiences of being sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by Jacob Appelbaum.[0]

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...

See https://www.zeit.de/2016/34/jacob-appelbaum-sexueller-missbr... from the Wikipedia article) and briefly alluded to in the FAQ at http://jacobappelbaum.net/ (- If you're a sexual predator, what better cover story is there than "the FBI is making shit up about me.") and https://archive.is/UX9Jk

This was brought up in discussions at the time as being a potential smear campaign against him. I personally didn't really buy this as being the most plausible explanation -- though I will say that the US government has definitely done things like this before (the FBI tried to manipulate MLK into committing suicide by threatening him with "evidence" of sexual misconduct[1]). And if I was a spook, it's probably the first course of action I would take to discredit someone.

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...