When three of Clinton’s principal accusers accepted Donald Trump’s invitation to sit front-row at a presidential debate, they were largely regarded by the left as a gallery of ghouls and liars. But that was politics, and an election was stake. Now—when all is lost—there’s been a change. The truth bats last.

Liberals seem almost giddy with relief, admitting what they believe—which is how it always feels when you finally decide that you’re going to say what you really think and to hell with the consequences. The truth does set you free, but it usually comes at a price, which is why it will probably take another 20 years to open The New York Times and read an editorial called “Hillary Knew.”

How could she not have known? She’s a hugely intelligent woman, a visionary, and a political street fighter; someone who knows her way through a difficult thicket of legal explanations as well as someone who understands as well as anyone the insane tactics of the fringe right and the surprising number of people who are gullible enough to fall prey to them. She didn’t kill her friend Vince Foster; she wasn’t running a child-trafficking operation at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria; and the Whitewater land deal was not the product of a white-collar crime on the scale of Enron’s pension thefts. Nor was she merely a machine politician lost in the wonkery of policy and unable to effect meaningful change.

As first lady, Hillary Clinton created a children’s health-insurance program that continues to provide health care to millions of American children; as a U.S. senator, she secured the billions of federal dollars necessary to right the great damage done to New York City and its residents after 9/11. But in addition to these great and good works, she must have looked at the facts about Juanita Broaddrick and decided to put them in the same locked box where she kept the truth of Bill’s consensual affairs. As a wife, she had every right to do that. But as a Democratic candidate for president—one whose historic campaign was largely centered on the glass ceiling and the rise of women—she had a Grand Canyon–size vulnerability, as she learned a year before the general election when she blithely tweeted out this corker: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.”

That’s our Hillary—and that’s the woman even some of her staunchest supporters have been gritting their teeth about for decades. (At least O. J. Simpson had the grace to spend a few months looking for “the real killer.”) Hillary had put the many women who’d credibly accused her husband of sexual misconduct into the forgetting hole and forgotten that women—progressive women and conservative women alike—have a very different view of rape and assault than they did 20 years ago. We don’t send victims who lack a police report or a photograph of their bruises to the back of the line. We understand that rape is so violent and so scarring that it can take years for a woman to come forward to describe it. We understand that—as with the women now accusing the U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sex crimes—it can take an abuser’s rise to greater fame and power to prompt them to stand up for themselves and tell the painful truth.