The female midshipman met with a chaplain at the academy, and then an academy sexual assault counselor. The counselor told her that she had already heard about the episode from five or six people, whom the counselor did not identify, but said none had provided the woman’s name, the midshipman said.

Still worried about the backlash, she was not fully cooperative once an investigation was begun by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “I told them I chose to drink, it was my fault, and I couldn’t remember,” she recalled. “The N.C.I.S. agent told me, ‘Just because you were drinking doesn’t give them the right.’ ”

In the weeks after the party, the woman said, one player approached her, saying he wanted her to remain quiet. She said she heard the same thing from other people who were in contact with the football players.

“This was a common message I heard over and over again,” she said. “They would say that the guys are saying that me not talking had kept the peace.”

Kenyon Williams, a midshipman and a friend of the woman, said she had to deal with subtle intimidation. “The football team sits together in the dining hall, and we would have to walk past them to go to dinner, and sometimes they would stare at her,” he said. Last fall, she had to abide by an academy rule requiring all midshipmen to attend every Navy home football game. She said that at some games, she would sit by herself.

“I hated every minute of it,” she said.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service interviewed many of those who attended the party, according to several midshipmen who said they were interviewed and officials who have been briefed on the inquiry. Several football players were questioned, but without the female midshipman’s full cooperation, the inquiry languished, according to the officials.

The woman said that she lost her driving privileges and privileges for weekends off campus because of her under-age drinking, which she had acknowledged during the investigation. That angered her because she said a lawyer for the academy told her she did not have to worry about being punished. The disciplinary action came after a meeting with the academy’s commandant then, Capt. Robert E. Clark II — the equivalent of the dean of students at a civilian university — who, she said, told her he thought of her as a daughter and urged her to cooperate with the investigation and talk about what had happened.