Salman Rushdie Relived His Stabbing Attack in Court Testimony

Salman Rushdie appeared in court on Tuesday to testify in the trial of the man who is accused of trying to murder him onstage at a talk in western New York in 2022. “It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought,” Rushdie said, per Courthouse News, during his recollection of the stabbing attack that blinded him in one eye. Per CNN, Rushdie described being aware that someone was “rushing” at him from his right. “He hit me very hard,” he 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.”

At one point, Rushdie took off his glasses to show the jury “what’s left of” his eye, noting that there’s “no vision [in it] at all.” According to The Guardian, Rushdie also recalled struggling to get away, holding a hand up in self-defense, and being “stabbed through that.” During cross-examination, he agreed that false memories can exist, noting that he initially thought he had stood up to face his assailant — even though he actually remained seated. Rushdie testified for about an hour before leaving the courthouse.

26-year-old defendant Hadi Matar has pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault in the attack that also wounded another person. In Rushdie’s memoir about the incident, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, he wrote that he was looking forward to seeing his attacker in court. Rushdie was not asked to identify his assailant while on the stand. In his testimony, he said he only saw the man who stabbed him with a ten-inch blade “at the last minute,” noting that the attacker was wearing dark clothes and had eyes that were “dark and seemed very ferocious.” Matar was seated about 20 feet away from Rushdie, and reportedly looked down often while he spoke.

Rushdie has faced decades of death threats for his controversial writing, with the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for the author’s death in a fatwa following the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. District Attorney Jason Schmidt has stated that discussing a motive won’t be necessary in Matar’s state trial, which is expected to last for up to two weeks. Matar is set to face a separate trial on federal terrorism charges, however, with an indictment alleging that his motives were connected to a terrorist organization’s endorsement of Khomeini’s fatwa.

• [CNN]
• [Courthouse News]
• [The Guardian]

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