“O.K., an apology’s going to come,” Michelle Fields tells me, recalling her own thought process on the evening of March 8. That was the fateful night that Fields, a 28-year-old campaign reporter with Breitbart, the conservative news agency, had been covering a Donald Trump rally at the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida. The televised segment of the campaign event had ended, but Trump was nevertheless gallivanting around the room, talking to reporters when Fields, whose mother is from Honduras, asked him a question about affirmative action. Almost immediately, she felt her arm being forcefully yanked by Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.

Fields may have expected an apology—“I was shaken,” she would later write—but what ensued was perhaps the most incomprehensible chapter in what has been the most surreal election cycle in modern memory. That apology never came. “Instead,” Fields recalls, “a couple of days later, Corey tweeted out that I was delusional, that they had never touched me. . . . They were making me out like I was a crazy person.” (Representatives for the Trump campaign declined to comment.)

A few days after the incident, even her own news agency published a piece essentially exonerating Lewandowski. Despite the fact that the Jupiter police released a video that indeed depicted Lewandowski grabbing Fields, Trump made her the subject of his fury—her pen could have been a “little bomb,” he claimed—and questioned her credibility and motivation.

Fields did not shy away from the maelstrom. On the same day that she filed a police report seeking battery charges against Lewandowski with the Jupiter police, she also commenced her own media blitz. She appeared on Fox News’s The Kelly File, where she told her host, Megyn Kelly, a fellow Trump target, that “they have basically done a character assassination on me.” Meanwhile, Fields took to Twitter with regularity. Less than a week after the incident, she resigned from Breitbart. A month later, Lewandowski insisted that he still wasn’t going to apologize. The state of Florida has since dropped the charges.

Introducing the Hive, VF.com’s New Tech, Business, and Politics Site

Fairly or not, questions began to arise about Fields. Was she simply a zealous reporter who had found her way into the sordid crosshairs of the Trump campaign’s media bazooka? Or had she, like the candidate she was covering, sought out a confrontation in order to leverage it for her own personal gain?

Months later, Fields appears to be sorting out the answers herself. “I love asking people questions that no one else is asking,” she says. “When I go to an event or an interview, I ask a question that a lot of Washington reporters aren’t asking—but one that a lot of activists and people who are really passionate about the issue wish reporters are asking.” She continues, “There’s no answer I specifically want; I just want a response.”

In conversation, Fields is friendly and warm. By all accounts, she has friends across the ideological spectrum. Many of the acquaintances and former friends I spoke with for this piece describe Fields, who has a penchant for Christian Louboutin heels and Diane von Furstenberg dresses, as kind. But in the four short years that she has worked as a journalist, she has also acquired a reputation for extraordinary ambition. Even in a city where everyone is always hustling, Fields has stood out for her drive, not just to cover the story, but to be the story too.

Fields was, quite literally, born into show business. Her father, Greg Fields, was an Emmy-nominated writer for In Living Color and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. As a teen, she appeared in a few bit roles in movies like Anna Faris’s The House Bunny. After she enrolled in Pepperdine University, she wasted little time getting in front of the camera, making frivolous videos with her friends. Jeff Loveness, her boyfriend at the time, recalled one of them in which she walked through Venice Beach, asking bystanders how much money it would take for them to give up the Internet forever.