“I didn’t host a dinner to humiliate you.

I hosted a dinner so that when I threw you out of my house tonight, your family would be right here, in person, to pick up your trash.”

I chose that dinner, and those witnesses, with great care, and I want to explain the reasoning, because it was not, whatever it looked like, an act of theatrical cruelty.

It was strategy, of a specific and deliberate kind.

I had learned something over six days of watching Julian smile and lie, which is that a man like him is dangerous precisely in private, because in private he can reshape reality.