Feinstein Rode One Court Fight to the Senate. Another Has Left Her Under Siege.

WASHINGTON — In October 1991, Dianne Feinstein, the former mayor of San Francisco, joined a silent crowd gathered around a television at Heathrow Airport in London to watch an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee question a young law professor about allegations that a Supreme Court nominee had sexually harassed her.

Enraged by what she saw in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, Feinstein ran for and won a Senate seat in California the next fall — and shortly after, a spot on the Judiciary Committee.

“Every woman that watched that changed,” Feinstein said in an interview last month with “The Daily,” a New York Times podcast, reflecting on what became known as the Year of the Woman. “I think change happened at that moment. What I am thinking to myself is, ‘Can I change this?'”

Twenty-seven years later, Feinstein, now the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, appears to finally have a chance to alter the course not just of a Supreme Court nomination but also a churning cultural conversation about women and sexual assault. But “change” is proving to be very complicated.

By disclosing the existence of a letter accusing Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault — a letter she had held secretly for weeks — Feinstein helped precipitate the outing of a reluctant accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, just days before a confirmation vote. In doing so, she has brought back to the forefront many of the same themes that Hill’s testimony raised a quarter century ago, and exposed herself to withering criticism, perhaps the worst of her Senate career.

Even before the letter emerged, Feinstein had found herself criticized by liberal Democrats who believed she had been too timid and deferential in her treatment of Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee.

“We need a senator from California who will stand up and #RESIST not #ASSIST,” state Sen. Kevin de León, who is challenging Feinstein for her Senate seat, said after she had all but apologized to Kavanaugh for the liberal protesters who interrupted his confirmation hearings.

Feinstein, at 85 the oldest member of the Senate, has at times appeared bewildered by the swirl of attention. Surrounded earlier this week by dozens of reporters as she moved through the Capitol, she waved her hands as if to cut off the questioning. At another point, she told a Fox News reporter Tuesday, “I can’t say everything’s truthful” in Blasey’s account. She later cleaned up the remark, but not before the White House seized on it.

Now, as Blasey, a California university professor, appears willing once again to come forward with testimony against Kavanaugh, Feinstein faces unrelenting questions about her handling of the matter, and perhaps more pressing ones about how to navigate what comes next.

“When Senator Feinstein sat with Judge Kavanaugh for a long period of time — a long, long meeting — she had this letter,” Trump said Tuesday. “Why didn’t she bring it up? Why didn’t the Democrats bring it up then? Because they obstruct and because they resist.”

Republican senators, wary of attacking Blasey directly, have piled on Feinstein instead, dispensing with much of the courtesy typically extended to a fellow lawmaker over what they see as a cynical 11th-hour effort to derail Kavanaugh: “An ambush attack,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota. A “drive by,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

Even Feinstein’s hometown newspaper, The San Francisco Chronicle, blasted the senator’s approach as “unfair,” specifically her release last week of a cryptic statement that she had referred a “matter to federal investigative authorities,” without saying what the matter was or whom it involved.

“Feinstein has been around Washington long enough to know that her opaque statement guaranteed that the contents of the letter, sent by a Stanford law professor on behalf of the accuser, would be pursued and publicized in short order,” the paper’s editorial board wrote Monday.

Feinstein has denied that she calculated much of anything — she was simply honoring Blasey’s wish for privacy. Aides say that in private, Feinstein has been taken aback by the intensity and repetition of the criticism, but expressed confidence she handled the situation correctly. Blasey’s lawyers and outside groups that work on women’s rights issues have agreed.

“President Trump, Dr. Blasey Ford did not want her story of sexual assault to be public,” Feinstein wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “She requested confidentiality and I honored that. It wasn’t until the media outed her that she decided to come forward. You may not respect women and the wishes of victims, but I do.”

A spokesman declined to make Feinstein available for an interview, but in statements, she has given Blasey forceful backing, accusing Republicans of short-circuiting a proper investigation on the matter by rushing a hearing. It is an odd position for Feinstein, a patrician Democrat who prizes her reputation as a dealmaker and puts relationships with Republicans above partisan credentials. In August, when Sen. Charles Grassley and his wife celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary, Feinstein sent a white orchid — the kind of charm that typically accompanies her overtures to Republican senators.

For more liberal Democrats who have rallied around hard-nosed resistance to Trump, the results are often frustrating. The senator’s apparent apology to Kavanaugh for the protesters, for instance, drew sharp dismissals from liberals on Twitter such as Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.

“Can someone ping me when Senator @maziehirono is up? Can someone also ping me when @SenFeinstein is convinced to retire?” Litman wrote.

Feinstein first learned of Blasey’s story in late July, when Rep. Anna Eshoo, a fellow California Democrat, hand-delivered the letter to the senator’s office in Washington. Feinstein’s staff asked the Senate Ethics Committee whether the senator could hire an independent, outside counsel to represent Blasey. But that would have required the signoff of two Republican chairmen, a violation of Feinstein’s pledge of confidentiality, so the effort was dropped.

Around the same time, Blasey retained a lawyer, Debra Katz, with whom Feinstein staff members repeatedly consulted in the ensuing weeks to see if the accuser would go public. She declined, even as senators sounded alarms about the implications of Kavanaugh’s confirmation on women’s rights.

“Feinstein was really an honest broker in this in saying: ‘These are serious allegations, and I will do what you would like. I will respect your decision,'” Katz said in an interview.

But as Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings barreled ahead, and speculation about the letter began to spread across Capitol Hill, the calculus changed. Under pressure from other Democratic senators on the committee, several of whom felt any serious allegation must be publicized, Feinstein called a meeting on Sept. 12 to brief them on its contents for the first time.

After redacting Blasey’s name, she sent it to the FBI that night, and issued her cryptic statement the next day acknowledging publicly for the first time that she had received “information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.” Within hours, news outlets, including The Times, reported the broad outlines of its contents. On Sunday, Blasey identified herself to The Washington Post. Some committee Democrats privately vented that Feinstein should have found a way forward earlier with a potentially nomination-changing accusation. But in the days since the accusation became public, Democrats have closed ranks.

“Senator Feinstein faced a choice that none of us would want to, and I think she handled it responsibly,” said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., who sits on the panel. “What was Senator Feinstein to do at this point, ignore her request, make it public to the embarrassment of her and her family?”

Outside of written statements, Feinstein has done little to defend her thinking. And the senator has only muddled her own case when speaking with reporters this week — sometimes despite reminders from staff members that she need not answer questions.

When, for example, one reporter asked Feinstein as she entered the Senate on Monday evening if she had had any discussions with Blasey after receiving the letter, the senator could not recall.

“I’ll have to look back,” she said. “I don’t know right now.”

Then she walked out of reach.