Jury hears detail of knife attack on Salman Rushdie, ‘The Satanic Verses’ author

MAYVILLE, New York: Jurors heard how a knife attack on novelist Salman Rushdie unfolded in a matter of seconds at a 2022 New York lecture and how close he came to death, in the prosecutor’s opening statement on Monday at the trial of the man accused of trying to murder the author.

A poet introducing the talk, on the subject of keeping writers safe from harm, was barely into his second sentence when defendant Hadi Matar bounded onto the Chautauqua Institution open-air stage and made about 10 running steps towards a seated Rushdie, Chautauqua District Attorney Jason Schmidt told the jury.

“Without hesitation, upon reaching Mr. Rushdie, he very deliberately and forcefully and efficiently at speed plunged the knife into Mr. Rushdie over and over and over and over and over and over again,” Schmidt said.

Trial of man in Salman Rushdie stabbing begins with jury selection

Rushdie, who spent most of the 1990s in hiding in the UK after receiving death threats over his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses,” was stabbed about 15 times: in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines.

Rushdie, 77, is due to testify about his injuries at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, a few miles north of the Chautauqua Institution, a rural arts haven.

Matar, 26, has pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault. The latter charge is for wounding 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. Reese is also due to testify.

Jurors will see videos of the attack, which some 1,000 audience members witnessed, and Matar’s arrest, and will hear from the Erie trauma surgeon who treated Rushdie after he had lost catastrophic volumes of blood, Schmidt said.

Matar said “Free Palestine, free Palestine,” as he walked past the public gallery after entering the courtroom, dressed in a blue shirt and dark pants, before the jury was brought in.

His lead defense lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, has been hospitalized with an illness, Barone’s colleagues told the court, but Judge David Foley denied their request to delay proceedings.

Lynn Schaffer, a public defender representing Matar, told the jury in her opening statement that the prosecution would fail to prove the necessary element of intent beyond reasonable doubt. She told them that none of the evidence Schmidt would present would show why Rushdie was attacked that day.

She pointed to some evidence that Schmidt had cited: the passes Matar had bought to enter the Chautauqua Institution on August 12, 2022, the morning of Rushdie’s appearance.

German President Frank Walter Steinmeier receives author Salman Rushdie in Berlin

Author Salman Rushdie arrives for a meeting with German President Frank Walter Steinmeier at Bellevue Castle in Berlin, Germany, May 16, 2024.

“Those gate passes are reflective of an intent to come in and watch a lecture, to watch a show,” Schaffer said.

Rushdie has published a memoir about the attack and his lengthy recuperation in which he imagines a conversation with his assailant.

He has said he believed he was going to die on the Chautauqua Institution’s stage.

FATWA AGAINST RUSHDIE

Rushdie, who was raised in a Muslim Kashmiri family, went into hiding under the protection of British police in 1989 after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced “The Satanic Verses” to be blasphemous.

Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious edict, called upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication, leading to a multimillion-dollar bounty and the 1991 murder of Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi.

The jury has heard no mention of the fatwa or the threats against Rushdie. Schmidt, the district attorney, has said it is irrelevant to proving the crime of attempted murder took place.

The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie ended his years as a recluse, becoming a fixture of literary gatherings in New York City, where he lives.

After the attack, Matar told the New York Post, opens new tab that he had traveled from his home in New Jersey after seeing the Rushdie event advertised because he disliked the novelist, saying Rushdie had attacked Islam. Matar, a dual citizen of his native U.S. and Lebanon, said in the interview he was surprised that Rushdie survived, the Post reported.

If convicted of attempted murder, Matar faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.

Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism and of providing material support to the armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.

Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.