WEST POINT, N.Y. — It was 6:30 a.m. at the United States Military Academy, the sun was rising over the Hudson River, and Paula Broadwell was in athletic gear. With a half-dozen women, she rotated between sprints and burpees. Sweating onto the pavement, the group was perched atop an overlook called Trophy Point, in the shadow of a 46-foot battle monument memorializing those killed in the Civil War. There is a female statue in bronze at the top, arms outstretched regally, who is said to represent “fame.”

Ms. Broadwell was here in April for a 40th anniversary celebration for the academy’s first class of women, who enrolled two decades before she would graduate near the top of her class, with multiple varsity letters. It was also the first time she had been back to campus since 2012, when she achieved her own kind of unwanted fame.

Yes, this is that Paula Broadwell, the mentee-turned-biographer of David H. Petraeus; the West Point graduate and military intelligence officer who was revealed, through a high-profile F.B.I. investigation, to have had a romantic relationship with Mr. Petraeus, a former C.I.A. director and the highest-profile general from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is also the Paula Broadwell who would be publicly portrayed as a “homewrecker,” a “stalker,” a “temptress,” the woman who “brought down the director of the C.I.A.” And, perhaps with the most frequency, as the “mistress,” a word for which there is no male equivalent.

As far as infidelity scandals go, this one had everything. He, with a Ph.D. from Princeton, was the revered “thinking man’s general”: honorable, visionary, charismatic, credited with turning around the failing war effort in Iraq and doing more one-armed push-ups than anyone his colleagues knew. “There was talk,” The Washington Post put it, “that, one day, King David would be president.” (Through his lawyer, David Kendall, Mr. Petraeus declined to comment for this article.)