In amoral political terms, Senate Republicans have been skillful in handling Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school.

On Monday, when Senator Charles Grassley, head of the Judiciary Committee, announced that a hearing on Blasey’s allegations would be held in a week, it wasn’t immediately clear that neither she nor her lawyer had been consulted. “They sent out a notice of a hearing before they contacted her,” Senator Mazie Hirono, a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told me. Then, when Blasey and her lawyers balked at Republican terms — asking, entirely reasonably, that the F.B.I. first examine her story — Republicans acted as if she was being irrational and going back on her word.

“They’re all piling on to her, as though it’s the most outrageous thing in the world to ask for an F.B.I. investigation,” Hirono said.

Blasey has been put in a nightmarish position. She was terrified of the backlash that going public would bring. Now, reportedly in hiding with her family amid death threats, she’s living what seems like her worst-case scenario. People on the right, including the president’s son, are mocking and smearing her. And as she adjusts to her radically changed circumstances, Republicans have subjected her to an ultimatum. She can agree by Friday to recount one of her life’s defining traumas to hostile men on extremely short notice, or lose her chance to have the Senate consider her story.