It occurred to me I was dying, Salman Rushdie tells trial of stabbing accused

Sir Salman Rushdie has described in graphic detail the moment in 2022 when a masked man rushed at him on a stage in western New York and repeatedly slashed him with a knife, leaving him with life-threatening injuries.

The 77-year-old author addressed jurors on the second day of evidence at the trial of Hadi Matar, 27, who has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault in the attack.

“I only saw him at the last minute,” Sir Salman said.

“I was aware of someone wearing black clothes, or dark clothes and a black face mask. I was very struck by his eyes, which were dark and seemed very ferocious.”

Sir Salman said he first thought his knife-wielding attacker was striking him with a fist.

“But I saw a large quantity of blood pouring onto my clothes,” he said. “He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing.”

Sir Salman said he was struck more times in his chest and torso and stabbed in his chest as he struggled to get away.

“I was very badly injured. I couldn’t stand up any more. I fell down,” he said.

While lying on the stage, he recalled “a sense of great pain and shock, and aware of the fact that there was an enormous quantity of blood that I was lying in”.

“It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought,” he said.

As he recounted the attack, his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, cried from her seat in the court’s second row.

Sir Salman was blinded in one eye in the attack and spent months recovering, a process he detailed in a memoir released last year. A speaker who was to appear with Sir Salman also was wounded.

The author spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation centre, where he had to relearn basic skills such as squeezing toothpaste from a tube.

“I think I’m not quite at 100%. I think I’ve substantially recovered but it’s probably 75 to 80%,” Sir Salman said. “I’m not as energetic as I used to be. I’m not as physically strong as I used to be.”

Matar, who was seated about 20 feet away from Sir Salman in the court, often looked down during his testimony.

Lynn Schaffer, a public defender representing Matar, began the cross-examination by asking the Booker Prize-winning author about his career.

The questioning was brief, low-key and for a moment friendly. She asked Sir Salman if he would be surprised that Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which he makes a cameo, was her favourite film.

“I am surprised,” Sir Salman said, joking that it was his “most important work”.

The only hint at a possible defence strategy was a question about whether trauma can affect memories.

Sir Salman acknowledged that he has a false memory, that he thought he stood up when he saw the attacker approaching, but that was not true.

She then challenged him to remember how many times he was struck.

He said: “I wasn’t counting at the time. I was otherwise occupied. But afterwards I could see them on my body. I didn’t need to be told by anybody.”

No one asked Sir Salman to identify his attacker in court and he declined to be interviewed as he left the courthouse after about an hour of evidence.

Jurors heard opening statements on Monday, followed by evidence from staff at the Chautauqua Institution, the non-profit art and education centre where the attack happened about 75 miles south of Buffalo.

The trial is expected to last up to two weeks.

Jurors are unlikely to hear about a fatwa issued by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for Sir Salman’s death, according to district attorney Jason Schmidt.

Sir Salman, the author of Midnight’s Children and Victory City, spent years in hiding after Khomeini announced the fatwa in 1989 following publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous

Mr Schmidt has said discussing motive will be unnecessary in the state trial, given the attack was seen by a live audience that was expecting to hear Sir Salman present a lecture on keeping writers safe.

“This is not a case of mistaken identity,” Mr Schmidt said during opening statements on Monday. “Mr Matar is the person who attacked Mr Rushdie without provocation.”

A public defender representing Matar told jurors that the case is not as straightforward as prosecutors have made it out to be.

“The elements of the crime are more than ‘something really bad happened’ — they’re more defined,” Lynn Schaffer said. “Something bad did happen, something very bad did happen, but the district attorney has to prove much more than that.”