“They’re not offering to put me on TV — they’re just doing stories,” Ms. Reade told me. “No anchors, no nothing like that.” She’d most like to tell her story to a network television anchor she admires — CBS’s Gayle King is one, she said — but they haven’t called.

So she’s planning to accept Fox News’s offer for an interview to air this weekend, she said, with “someone a little more up the middle.” She declined to say who, but a person who has spoken to her said Ms. Reade is in talks with Chris Wallace.

The booking would be a coup for the conservative network, and give its on-air hosts a club with which to beat a mainstream media that can’t quite explain why it won’t book Ms. Reade, while Julie Swetnick, a woman with a shaky claim against a Supreme Court nominee, got airtime during a prime time evening broadcast.

Some of the reasons this story seems muffled right now are fairly straightforward: The global coronavirus pandemic has eclipsed almost everything else. There’s also the way Ms. Reade first tried getting attention, mostly on Twitter, “stumbling forward with no P.R. person and no attorney,” she said.“I emailed Ronan Farrow like four times to the point of stalking and I didn’t hear back,” she added. “Now of course he’s one of the investigative reporters on this.” After The Times’s story was published Thursday, Ms. Reade said that she had meant that Mr. Farrow had not initially responded to her, but they were now “actively communicating.”

Then she found partisans willing to hear her out. First it was among supporters of Bernie Sanders, like the podcast host Katie Halper, who put Ms. Reade on her show. Then The Intercept, an anti-establishment liberal news website, reported that a friend and brother of Ms. Reade’s recalled her describing the incident.

The traditional media, including the Times reporters Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember, waded in carefully. Then the fast-moving news site Business Insider reported other details that gave further weight to Ms. Reade’s story. The reporter, Rich McHugh, had taken the story to Vanity Fair first, which declined to publish it, a spokesperson for Vanity Fair confirmed. The broadcast television networks, CNN and MSNBC have covered the story on their websites, while Fox News has covered developments breathlessly on air and online.

There’s still no clear explanation, however, for why Ms. Reade hasn’t been on mainstream TV. Representatives for CNN and MSNBC declined to explain why they haven’t booked a woman who is, whether you believe her or not, one of the few newsmakers right now who could cut through the pandemic.