From an article in The Atlantic by Mary Coppins, who asked Jeff Flake if the impassioned lecture he got from a rape survivor spurred his compromise call for a limited FBI investigation (emphasis mine):
I don’t know if there was any one thing, but I was just unsettled. You know, when I got back to the committee, I saw the food fight again between the parties – the Democrats saying they’re going to walk out, the Republicans blaming everything on the Democrats.
And then there was Chris Coons making an impassioned plea for a one-week extension to have an FBI investigation. And you know, if it was anybody else I wouldn’t have taken it as seriously. But I know Chris. We’ve traveled together a lot. We’ve sat down with Robert Mugabe. We’ve been chased by elephants, literally, in Mozambique. We trust each other. And I thought, if we could actually get something like what he was asking for—an investigation limited in time, limited in scope—we could maybe bring a little unity.
We can’t just have the committee acting like this. The majority and minority parties and their staffs just don’t work well together. There’s no trust. In the investigation, they can’t issue subpoenas like they should. It’s just falling apart.
So yeah, it was Bipartisan Man employing his secret weapon, friendship, that opened the door to, at least potentially, finding out how much of a creep and liar Brett Kavanaugh actually is. Strong evidence that Coons’ approach has its rewards.