BEIRUT, Lebanon — It was part corporate presentation, part legal defense, part rambling tirade.

For more than two hours on Wednesday, Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan executive who fled house arrest in Japan and surfaced in Lebanon last month, launched an impassioned defense of his decision to escape, portraying himself as the victim of a rigged justice system and a corporate coup by disloyal underlings.

By the end of the day, sitting at a conference room table with his wife, Mr. Ghosn seemed less defiant than tired. In an interview with The New York Times, he acknowledged that he had regrets. The biggest: He wished he had retired before everything unraveled.

Mr. Ghosn, who led an auto empire that spanned continents, was arrested in late 2018 and charged with financial wrongdoing. The reporters who gathered to hear him speak at a Beirut news conference had hoped for an account of his daring international escape — a dash across Japan to a chartered jet that carried him out of the country.

Instead, they were treated to a wide-ranging and sometimes hard-to-follow defense against the charges that Japanese prosecutors had leveled against him. He attacked the authorities in Tokyo as well as executives at Nissan.