Dragged into the hall, Draupadi does not plead. She puts a legal question to the assembled elders: Yudhishthira staked himself and lost before he staked her, so did a man who was already property have any standing to wager a wife at all. It is a technically exact challenge, and the court cannot meet it.
Of the elders present only Vikarna, one of Duryodhana's own brothers, answers her, and he is shouted down. Bhishma replies that the course of dharma is subtle and that he cannot decide the point, which from the conscience of the court is a confession rather than a ruling. Vidura protests and is ignored. The silence of men who are competent to answer and will not is what the epic actually indicts, more than the assault itself.
The rescue is the most famous image in the story and it is also the most argued. In the telling most people know, Duhshasana pulls at her garment and it renews itself without end, and Krishna is named as the cause. Readers of the manuscript tradition have long noted that the verses making Krishna the direct agent are not uniform across recensions, and whether the older narrative worked through her own righteousness or through his intervention is genuinely disputed among editors.
What follows is not a rescue either. Dhritarashtra, alarmed by omens, grants her boons, and she uses them to free her husbands rather than to punish anyone. Then she vows to leave her hair unbound until it can be washed in the blood of the man who touched it, and the war begins to move.