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Reuters

Salman Rushdie spoke calmly and with occasional dry humour as he testified on Tuesday against the man accused of trying to murder him, the first time the two have been in the same place since the 2022 knife attack on the novelist onstage at a New York arts institute.
Hadi Matar, 26, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault.
Rushdie, 77, walked into the courtroom dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and grey tie.
Two sheriff’s deputies stood at alert by Matar, seated at a table with his team of public defenders.
The right lens of Rushdie’s spectacles was blacked out, masking the eye, which his attacker’s knife had pierced through to the optic nerve.
“I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right hand side,” Rushdie testified in a courtroom in Mayville, a few kilometres north of the Chautauqua Institution, the lakeside rural arts haven where he was attacked on August 12, 2022.

The controversial writer, for decades the target of death threats, had been seated onstage at the institution’s outdoor amphitheatre that morning, about to give a talk on keeping writers safe from harm.
“He hit me very hard,” Rushdie said. “Initially, I thought he had punched me. I thought he was hitting me with his fist. But very soon afterwards I saw really quite a very large quantity of blood pouring out onto my clothes, and by that time he was hitting me repeatedly. Stabbing, slashing.”
Rushdie’s wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, sat in the public gallery, becoming tearful as Rushdie described falling bloodied to the floor. She was next to the writer Bill Buford, a friend of Rushdie’s, who took Griffiths’ hand to comfort her.
Matar, dressed in a baggy blue shirt, sometimes looked at Rushdie, and filled the page of a yellow legal pad with dark ink. In his memoir about the attack, Rushdie wrote that he was looking forward to facing him in a courtroom.
Soon after the attack, Matar, a US-Lebanese dual citizen from New Jersey, told the New York Post in a jailhouse interview that he disliked Rushdie because he believed the writer had insulted Islam, and said he was surprised that Rushdie survived.
His defence lawyers have not disputed that Matar was in the amphitheatre that day but have told the jury that the prosecutor’s evidence will not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Matar had the necessary criminal intent to be convicted of attempted murder.
Born in India into a Muslim Kashmiri family, Rushdie spent most of the 1990s in hiding in the UK after receiving death threats over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
The novel prompted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, to issue a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie for what he said was blasphemy against Islam.
The jury has not heard about the fatwa or the threats against Rushdie’s life, with the Chautauqua prosecutor’s office saying they are not relevant to proving the charges against Matar.
Rushdie abandoned his reclusive existence more than two decades ago, moving to New York.
Onstage at the Institution, Rushdie was stabbed about 15 times: in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines, nearly killing him, according to his surgeons. Rushdie said the stabbing in his right eye, which almost penetrated his brain, was the most dangerous.
“You can see that’s what’s left of it,” Rushdie said, removing his spectacles and turning to the jury. “There’s no vision in the eye at all.” He also pointed out scars on his neck and left hand.

The assault charge is for the wounding of Henry Reese, the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a non-profit group that helps exiled writers, who was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.
Rushdie described his attacker as dressed in dark clothes with a dark face mask.
“I was very struck by his eyes which were dark and seemed very ferocious to me,” Rushdie testified.
A defence lawyer for Matar objected to the characterisation, and Judge David Foley struck the answer from the record.
“OK, not ferocious,” Rushdie said.
Chautauqua District Attorney Jason Schmidt rephrased his question, asking the writer how he came to make conclusions about his attacker’s ferocity. “He struck me a number of times, another half a dozen times,” Rushdie replied. “At some point I thought I was dying. That was my immediate thought.”
If convicted of attempted murder, Matar faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. He also faces separate federal terrorism charges at a trial in Buffalo.
Lynn Schaffer, one of Matar’s defence lawyers, asked Rushdie in her cross examination about how he was able to testify that he was stabbed 15 times.
“I wasn’t counting at the time,” Rushdie said. “As I said, I was otherwise occupied. But afterwards I could see them on my body. I didn’t need to be told by anybody.”
Schaffer asked him about his work as a writer and his occasional cameos in films, noting that Bridget Jones’ Diary was one of her favourites.
“My most important work,” Rushdie replied, a few minutes before he stepped down from the stand and walked near Matar’s table to leave the courtroom.


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Crime

Salman Rushdie faces his accused stabber in New York courtroom

Salman Rushdie testifies, gesturing how the attacker slashed his throat, in Chautauqua County court in Mayville, New York, on Tuesday. Courtroom sketch: Elizabeth Williams via AP

Hadi Matar is escorted from the courtroom at the Chautauqua County courthouse in Mayville, New York, on Tuesday. Photo: AP

Author Salman Rushdie arrives to address a press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany in October 2023. Photo: AFP

New York jury hears attacker repeatedly stabbed Salman Rushdie

Author Salman Rushdie with his book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Photo: AFP

Hadi Matar, right, charged with severely injuring Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack, is led in to Chautauqua County court in Mayville, New York on Monday. Photo: AP

Matar has said he had only read two pages of Rushdie’s novel but believed the author had ‘attacked Islam’. Photo: AP

Salman Rushdie releasing memoir ‘Knife’ about horrifying attack on his life that left him blind in one eye

Author Salman Rushdie will release a memoir of a horrifying attack that left him blind in one eye. Photo: AP

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. The book, about the attempt on his life that left him blind in his right eye. Photo: Random House/AP

Salman Rushdie makes first in-person public appearance since 2022 stabbing: ‘I feel great’

British-American novelist Salman Rushdie at the PEN America 2023 Spring Literary Gala in New York. Photo: EPA-EFE

Rushdie, 75, was blinded in one eye and suffered nerve damage to his hand from the 2022 attack. Photo: AP

Salman Rushdie warns free expression in the West under threat in rare speech after attack

British author Salman Rushdie. Photo: APA/AFP/Getty Images/TNS

Salman Rushdie lost sight in one eye after attack, agent says

Salman Rushdie in 2018. File photo: AFP 

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The hearing is the first time the writer and Hadi Matar, who allegedly tried to kill him, have been in the same space since the knife attack


The hearing is the first time the writer and Hadi Matar, who allegedly tried to kill him, have been in the same space since the knife attack.
