Wayne LaPierre was sitting in a chair with his hands over his ears, looking straight down. “It was horribly painful,” he said of the nearly two years of investigations, intrigue and infighting that have roiled the National Rifle Association, which he has led since 1991. Now, a once-invincible organization, and its chief, are girding for a legal reckoning. “I mean,” LaPierre said, looking up, “it’s the most painful period of my life.”

[New York Attorney General Letitia James sues the NRA.]

His office at the N.R.A.’s headquarters, an unremarkable concrete-and-glass warren in the Virginia suburbs just outside Washington, was largely empty. His desk was bare, the only sign of work life two stacks of yellow legal pads perched on nearby windowsills. He does not use computers. LaPierre has long been the public face of the N.R.A., but he hasn’t sat for an in-depth interview in years. The notable increase in mass shootings, more than two dozen this summer alone, many of them involving the semiautomatic rifles the N.R.A. has championed, has made him defensive. “All these horrible tragedies — after every one, Wayne would be the guy going out there in the media,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. “From Columbine to — you name it — to the Navy Yard to Aurora to Sandy Hook. Every one of them, I was the guy — Parkland — I was the guy out there in the media.” The N.R.A. was “so miscast by the media,” he insisted, he saw little reason to engage reporters. “You just didn’t get a fair shot anymore.”

In person, LaPierre can seem like an absent-minded academic, his hands in motion, his thoughts wandering. (“The joke is that the only way you can have eye contact with Wayne is to lie down on the floor while he’s talking,” one person who worked for the organization told me.) Within the N.R.A., and contrary to his public persona, LaPierre has often been seen as a suit who doesn’t know his way around guns. He is aware of the slight, and tries to compensate. He shot wildlife more than once on the N.R.A.-sponsored TV show “Under Wild Skies” he said, because “one of the raps on me is I wasn’t going hunting enough.” In our three-hour on-the-record conversation in late October, he was occasionally evasive, often startlingly direct and always acutely, sometimes painfully self-aware. At one point, after a lengthy historical digression, he pulled himself up short: “I know I’m just filibustering,” he said. “Do you want me to stop?”

LaPierre has faced many political battles over the course of his long career at the top of the N.R.A., but the personal stakes have never been higher than they have been in the last year. His organization sued Ackerman McQueen, its longtime advertising and public relations firm, which long safeguarded the N.R.A.’s secrets, accusing the firm of overbilling and fraud. He — perhaps temporarily — held off an internal campaign to oust him. And since April, the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, has been conducting a civil investigation of the N.R.A., which is chartered in New York. Now, veterans of the attorney general’s office and some within the N.R.A.’s inner circle believe James will weigh whether to seek a criminal referral related to LaPierre’s use of nonprofit funds for personal expenses.