When I met with Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Minority Leader, in her office on Wednesday afternoon, the revelations about badly behaved men in media were coming so quickly it was hard to keep track. When we sat down in her corner office on the second floor of the Capitol, Pelosi had not yet heard the news about the longtime public-radio host (and former New Yorker contributor) Garrison Keillor’s firing after a sexual-harassment accusation. “Garrison Keillor? No-o-o,” she said. “Garrison Keillor? Really?”

It had not been the best few days for Pelosi. On Sunday, she appeared on “Meet the Press,” in the midst of rapidly escalating demands that Congress do more to address the sexual harassers in its own ranks. Pelosi—the most senior female politician in either national party—did not have a good show. Repeatedly asked by the host, Chuck Todd, whether Congressman John Conyers, Jr., a Detroit Democrat accused of sexual harassment by former staffers, should be forced out as the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Pelosi called Conyers an “icon” of the civil-rights movement, asserted his right to “due process,” and said that she did not know his accusers. At the same time, Pelosi called for “zero tolerance” of such behavior. Conyers would quit his Judiciary post under pressure a few hours later, but Pelosi refused to publicly demand it, telling Todd only that she was sure Conyers would “do the right thing.”

And just like that, the only woman ever to serve as Speaker of the House had inserted herself into the unfolding national uproar over male misbehavior. Was Congress still just the same old boys’ club that protected its own, even with a woman leading the show? There were outraged tweets, angry online takes, cable-TV denunciations, and new statements from Pelosi’s office walking back her comments, at least partially. On Monday, Pelosi announced that she had met with and “believed” one of Conyers’s accusers, and demanded a swift Ethics Committee investigation.

When I met with Pelosi on Wednesday afternoon, Conyers was refusing to quit Congress altogether, despite the escalating demands. Meanwhile, a junior Democratic congresswoman and Pelosi critic was talking to a scrum of reporters in a classic bit of congressional grandstanding that made clear the political imperatives behind the ire directed at Pelosi, with President Trump himself an accused serial harasser and the Republican Senate candidate in Alabama facing allegations of making repeated unwanted sexual advances on teen-agers when he was in his thirties. “I think that her comments set women back and, quite frankly, our party back decades,” Congresswoman Kathleen Rice, of New York, told the reporters. “I think that we ceded the moral high ground on Sunday when our leader said on ‘Meet the Press’ that John Conyers was an icon and we don’t even know who these women are, when she was fully aware that the woman in question was bound by a nondisclosure agreement. I think we had an opportunity to stake that moral high ground when you have a President who is supporting a man for Senate who—all credible allegations that have not been refuted—showed him to be a predator of teen-age girls.”

So what did Pelosi make of it all?

It took only a minute or so into our interview before it was clear that she was not going to take back her previous comments. Pelosi called Conyers an “icon,” and insisted that “due process” was not something to be so quickly abandoned, even in the middle of a national uproar. She veered between dismay at what she portrayed as a double standard that somehow made her a convenient target when male misdeeds should be the issue, and an insistence that this national awakening would end up being an “opportunity” that could be seized to make progress for women. “Look,” she said, “I see everything as an opportunity.”

Pelosi noted that she would soon go to the House floor to be on hand for the passing of new rules requiring mandatory anti-sexual-harassment training. She was also working with other members on a new law that would change Congress’s secretive, cumbersome, and widely criticized system for dealing with sexual-harassment cases, which had allowed Conyers to make an undisclosed financial settlement, in 2015, to one of his victims using taxpayer funds.

Pelosi’s shock and dismay about the revelations was evident. She had “never, never” heard even rumors of such abuses by Conyers, she said, and knew nothing of his secret settlement. At the same time, she readily agreed when I asked if she still considered him an “icon” after the allegations that included demanding sex from a staffer and walking around in front of aides without his clothes on.

“I feel sad for Mr. Conyers,” Pelosi responded. “He has been a valued member for fifty years in the Congress of the United States.” And yes, she said, “I think he has been an icon. He’s been a civil-rights leader and the rest of that.” Even so, she quickly added, “no matter how great your legacy, there’s no license to abuse people.”

Pelosi described working behind the scenes over the Thanksgiving break to push Conyers out of the Judiciary ranking membership, noting repeatedly that it took only five days amid a national holiday to get him to leave. “I was showing him the door,” she said. The timing, however, was terrible: when she gave the “Meet the Press” interview, Conyers had already agreed to go but was still negotiating over how he would announce that he was stepping aside. “I knew he was leaving,” Pelosi said, but she didn’t feel she could disclose it on air.

Later in our conversation, she returned to this point. “I did my job. That’s all I can do, is say who can serve in a capacity on a committee as a ranking. I didn’t get any credit for, just before Thanksgiving, having him gone by Sunday with Thanksgiving in between,” she told me. “Is it all right to give him time to tell his family? Is it all right to do that? Probably not, but we did. It was scheduled to happen, it was scheduled to happen. It was his announcement. I said, ‘Why isn’t it out there?’ They said, ‘Well, they wanted to change a word for the family’s sake,’ or this or that, whatever, and so it went out a little bit later.”

On air, Pelosi had said that “he will do the right thing.” But, she now told me ruefully, “they didn’t want to hear that.”

For much of this year, Pelosi has been under fire from parts of her Democratic caucus, who worry that the seventy-seven-year-old veteran is not the perfect standard-bearer for a minority party looking to take back the House next year and battle the excesses of the Trump Presidency. She survived an intraparty challenge to her leadership at the start of the year, but only after sixty-three House Democrats voted against her remaining as Minority Leader. Pelosi told me, as she has said before, that she had planned to depart if Hillary Clinton had become President and decided to remain in the post for two reasons: to help block Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare and because, if she hadn’t, there would be “nothing but men at the table” in Washington’s political leadership.

Just a few weeks ago, in fact, Pelosi had seized the opportunity to dramatically underscore just how isolated and marginalized women have become in Trump-era Washington. Summoned to the White House for a negotiating session with the President and congressional leaders of both parties, there were ten men in the room—and Pelosi. Twice, Pelosi tried to answer a question and was spoken over. Finally, she interjected, “Does anybody listen to women when they speak around here?”

This, to me, is a key and often overlooked point amid the unfolding national reckoning over workplace mistreatment of women: it’s happening at a time when there are fewer women than in many years in key Washington positions. Trump’s Cabinet is the most white and most male since the Reagan Administration. There are no women in any of the key positions that involve U.S. national security or foreign policy or law enforcement, unless you count Nikki Haley, the Ambassador to the United Nations, an entity that is not exactly a pillar of Trump’s America First, go-it-alone foreign policy. Or take U.S. Attorneys, the chief federal prosecutors for their regions. In September, it was revealed that Trump’s nominees for those prestigious jobs so far were 97.6 per cent male—as in, forty-one men versus one woman. What was the response to the outcry? As of two weeks ago, when the latest batch was named, Trump was up to fifty-seven nominees—and three women among them.