The New York Times Is Obsessed with 2 Things. You Already Know What They Are.

But at an Upper East Side dinner party a few months back, Ms. Dunham expressed more conflicted feelings. She told the guests, at the Park Avenue apartment of Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, that she was disturbed by how, in the 1990s, the Clintons and their allies discredited women who said they had had sexual encounters with or been sexually assaulted by former President Bill Clinton. The conversation, relayed by several people with knowledge of the discussion who would speak about it only anonymously, captures the deeper debate unfolding among liberal-leaning women about how to reconcile Mrs. Clinton's leadership on women's issues with her past involvement in her husband's efforts to fend off accusations of sexual misconduct.

But the resurfacing of the scandals of the 1990s has brought about a rethinking among some feminists about how prominent women stood by Mr. Clinton and disparaged his accusers after the "bimbo eruptions," as a close aide to the Clintons, Betsey Wright, famously called the claims of affairs and sexual assault against Mr. Clinton in his 1992 campaign. Even some Democrats who participated in the effort to discredit the women acknowledge privately that today, when Mrs. Clinton and other women have pleaded with the authorities on college campuses and in workplaces to take any allegation of sexual assault and sexual harassment seriously, such a campaign to attack the women's character would be unacceptable.

Much of her involvement played out behind the scenes, and was driven, in part, by her sense that right-wing forces were using the women and salacious stories to damage her husband's political ambitions. Her reflex was to protect him and his future, and, early on, she turned to a longtime Clinton loyalist, Ms. Wright, to defend him against the allegations, according to multiple accounts at the time, documented in books and oral histories. "We have to destroy her story," Mrs. Clinton said of one of the first women to come forward during her husband's first presidential campaign, Connie Hamzy, in 1991, according to George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton administration aide who described the events in his memoir, "All Too Human.'' (Three people signed sworn affidavits saying Ms. Hamzy's story was false.)

Now that the stories are resurfacing, they could hamper Mrs. Clinton's attempts to connect with younger women, who are learning the details of the Clintons' history for the first time. Several news organizations have published guides to the Clinton scandals to explain the allegations to a new generation of readers.