Back in December of 2013, Barack Obama invited to the White House a contingent of leaders from Silicon Valley to discuss topics varying from national security to the government’s infamous rollout of the Obamacare Web site. Invitees included industry stalwarts such as Netflix’s Reed Hastings, Apple’s Tim Cook, and figures of a bygone era, like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Zynga’s Mark Pincus. While the meeting was generally attended by the founders and chief executives of tech companies, also in attendance was Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, who had long earned a sort of hallowed status in the industry as an adultifying force on both Facebook and its boy-king founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Traditionally, these sorts of ceremonial, optics-friendly convocations follow a certain prescribed choreography: the guests show up and mingle amicably among themselves, then the president arrives and makes his way through the room, offering pleasantries before attendees take their assigned seats. At the appointed time, the media pool is allowed in—broadcast cameras capture an often stilted, awkward protocol; news camera rapidly snap photographs. Then the cameras depart, and the real conversation begins.

This particular December meeting appeared to follow this routine. But three people in attendance all recounted to me afterwards one notable irregularity. Sandberg waited for the exact moment that the photographers started taking pictures to reach across the table and greet the president. Sure, the president and Sandberg had a relationship; among other things, Sandberg was an acolyte of Larry Summers, Obama’s former director of the National Economic Council. But her well-timed gesture ensured that the subsequent photograph landed across the front page of every paper, atop every digital story covering the meeting, effectively making it appear as though Obama and Sandberg were personally meeting while all those other C.E.O.s were just wallpaper.

This anecdote confirmed for me what many in the Valley already knew. Beneath her polite and forthright veneer, Sandberg was a political animal, and a brilliant one at that. What many people learned this week, after The New York Times published a story describing her often appalling, misleading behavior in the wake of Facebook’s role in the 2016 election fiasco, is that she is also a vicious one. The Times report laid bare to the public what many tech reporters and Valley observers already believed: Sandberg wasn’t collateral damage of fake news, Cambridge Analytica, and Russia’s influence campaign; she was as responsible for the company’s flat-footed, defensive response as Zuckerberg himself. (In a Facebook post Thursday, Sandberg acknowledged that she and Zuckerberg were “too slow” to respond to Russian interference, but said it is “simply untrue” that they weren’t interested in knowing the truth or tried to hide information from the public. “The allegations saying I personally stood in the way are also just plain wrong,” she said. “Nothing could be more important to me or to Facebook.”)

Meanwhile, the narrative of Sheryl Sandberg—brilliant executive, proud feminist, personal champion of loss and love, transcendent figure—appeared to suffer an irreversible blow. Sandberg’s potential political career seems toast. As Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway noted on a recent episode of their excellent new podcast, Pivot, she may soon find herself being delicately ostracized from the standard left in-crowd—a rarified ecosystem of which she was not only part of the firmament, but perhaps the mayor.

It’s an extraordinary reckoning. For years, Sandberg’s life has been curated down to the nanosecond. Being invited to one of Sandberg’s parties, hosted at her home or elsewhere, was the hottest ticket in town—an opportunity to hang with Beyoncé and Lady Gaga, Hillary Clinton and Gavin Newsom, intergalactic billionaire Yuri Milner and even Zuck. Some parties celebrated milestones, others the launch of a new book, and some were focused on her own mission to build the lean-in brand. But all of them unmistakably cemented her position as the deific figure at the nucleus of the universe, the coolest kid in the class at the world’s most elite high school. (As I discuss on the most recent episode of Inside the Hive, the myth of Sheryl Sandberg is almost as powerful as Sandberg, herself.)

Sandberg’s ability to control the press has helped her maintain this image. When Sandberg meets with reporters, she is often given a folder laying out personal details about the person, answers to any question she might be asked, well beyond the normal meet-and-greet. In news interviews on television, Sandberg dictates every last detail, including the kinds of questions that can be asked, and those that cannot. Days after the bombshell Times report, Sandberg appeared as a guest on CBS This Morning in a remarkable display of her time-worn tactics.