Nothing at all like that, and I had no problem applying anywhere else. The point is, they shouldn't send you through interviews when they can know they're not going to hire you anyway. (In the context, it seemed like the CEO was just trying to make himself useful by feeling out each candidate for what his gut told him. Whenever I asked him to clarify a question, he would refuse to explain at all, and just say "whatever you interpret that to mean".)
Hmm -- I'm not you, and I wasn't there. But something tells me you're looking at this (retroactively) as a "glass half-empty" thing. As in: "they must have seen some big negatives in me, otherwise they wouldn't have asked that question, about [past history]."
Whereas you could have also looked at it this way: "They must have seen some big positives in me, being as they asked me to come talk to them, knowing full well about [past history]." You know, the glass half-full route.
But then again, I'm not you, and I wasn't there.
You're talking about this like I'm some charity case. Again, I don't have trouble finding interest or applying elsewhere and I don't depend on anyone seeing enough "goods" to take a chance on some bum.
But not knowing what exactly that [part of history] was about, of course we can only speculate.