“It was more than obvious to me that she bore the scars of what she had been subjected to,” Eshoo said in an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday. “She doesn’t have a political bone in her body. And she obviously was really terrified about what could become of her and her family.”

“At the end of the meeting, I told her that I believed her,” she added. “In telling her story, you know, there were details to it, and I believed her.”…

“I think it’s difficult for people to understand if you haven’t dealt with people that have been subjected to something like this,” she said. “They keep it to themselves. They feel guilty. They bury it. They tell themselves to move on. And so there wasn’t any kind of political process in her mind whatsoever.”