Salman Rushdie to Take Stand During Trial of Man who Attacked him Onstage at Event in Upstate New York
- Hadi Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, jumped onstage and stabbed the Mumbai-born author repeatedly in the face and the abdomen before members of the audience pulled the assailant away.
Novelist Salman Rushdie will take the stand during the trial of the man accused of attacking him the onstage at a literary event in Upstate New York in August 2021. The Indian American author was was attacked onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, a summer arts community in New York, where he was scheduled to speak about the U.S. as a safe haven for exiled writers. As the event was about to begin, Hadi Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, jumped onstage and stabbed Rushdie repeatedly in the face and the abdomen before members of the audience pulled the assailant away. Rushdie was gravely injured, placed temporarily on a ventilator, and left blind in his right eye.
Matar, who has been charged with attempted second-degree murder and second-degree assault, has pleaded not guilty. He faces up to 32 years in prison if convicted on both counts. He also faces federal terrorism-related charges in Buffalo. He is accused of offering “personnel, specifically himself, and services” to terrorists and of providing “material support and resources” to Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, where he grew up, according to the indictment.
At the trial, to be held at the Chautauqua County Courthouse in Mayville, New York, Jason Schmidt, the district attorney, plans to call 15 witnesses, including Rushdie, to testify against Matar, The New York Times reported, Others include “people who were present when the attack happened, police officers and one of the doctors who treated Rushdie,” the publication said. Jurors will be shown video of the attack, as well as photos and documentation. According to Judge David Foley “once jury selection is complete, the trial would take up to a week and a half,” The Times report said.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that Matar’s lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, “has not explained how he plans to defend his client and has “clapped back at critics” who question why Matar did not take a plea deal. “That’s not what this is about. It’s about due process,” he told the news agency. “It’s about receiving a fair trial … If someone wants to exercise those rights, they’re entitled to do that.”
Matar was born in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. He became more isolated and fixated on Islam after a 2018 trip to the Middle East, his mother, Silvana Fardos, told The Times.
Rushdie spent about 10 years under police protection in Britain, living in hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran called for his execution in 1989 because his novel “The Satanic Verses” was considered offensive to Islam. “The book was banned in India, and he was barred from the country for more than a decade,” The New York Times reported.
He wrote “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” about the onstage attack. According to him, the book is “a way to take charge of what happened and to answer violence with art.” In “Knife,” Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day of the attack, its aftermath, as well as his journey towards physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.
But Rushdie almost didn’t make it to the event. Two nights before, he was contemplating cancelling his appearance, because of a dream. He was in an ancient Roman amphitheater, rolling around on the ground while a gladiator with a spear stabbed down at him. “”I was rolling about in bed and thrashing around, and my wife had to wake me up,” he told Stephen Colbert during a appearance on his late night TV show last week. But he rationalized his fears. “People have dreams. You don’t run your daily life because of having a bad dream. And so I decided I would go,” he told Colbert. Little did he know that his entire world would be turning upside down.
Recalling the incident, he credited some brave strangers with coming to his rescue after he was stabbed, including the fireman who used his thumb to stem the bleeding. He thought he was dying, he said, but admitted that during his near-death experience, there was “no heavenly choir and no runner of light.”
He told NPR that the attack changed his understanding of death. “I think what it did is two things that it, first of all, gave me a kind of familiarity with death,” he said. “I kind of know how it goes now. I didn’t get to the final note of the music, thank goodness. But I kind of understand how the tune goes. But also what it did, what it has done, is to give me an enormously increased appreciation of life,” he added. “I feel like these are days I wasn’t supposed to have, and yet here I am, having them, and every day is a blessing.”
When he began thinking of writing the book, he wondered what more he could bring to it, apart from the attack. That’s when he began to realize that it was about himself in between two forces. “One is a force of violence and hatred, and the other is the force of love and healing,” he told NPR. The book became about three people — him, his assailant, his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths And so I wanted to write about love, and in a more open and direct way than maybe that I’ve ever done before.