11-02-2025
Salman Rushdie removes glasses for one-eyed stare down of attacker
Sir Salman Rushdie turned to his left, removed his glasses, one lens tinted, one clear and revealed to the jury the deep scar where his right eye used to be.
'You can see that's what's left of it. There's no vision in the eye at all,' he said, sitting just 20ft away from the man who took it away.
Taking the witness stand at the trial of his assailant, Hadi Matar, the author went into excruciating detail about the brutal attack in Upstate New York on Aug 12 2022.
Dressed in a dark suit and blue tie, Sir Salman remained composed and cool while face to face with his attacker for the first time since he was stabbed 15 times on stage at the Chautauqua Institution.
Sitting in the second row of the courtroom, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Sir Salman's wife, became tearful as she watched her husband walk across the courtroom's maroon carpets to the witness box.
Speaking in the wood panelled room just four miles away from the scene of the attack, the Booker Prize winner described how he thought he was dying as he lay in a 'lake' of his own blood during the frenzied attack.
As he entered courtroom 207, Matar, 27, dressed in the same untucked blue shirt and black plimsolls as Monday, sang: From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.'
Matar, who faces up to 25 years in prison if he is convicted of attempted murder and assault, barely averted his gaze from a yellow legal pad in front of him as Sir Salman described the savage attack.
Sir Salman, who had written about confronting his assailant in his memoir Knife: Mediations After an Attempted Murder, only briefly looked at the defendant as he spoke, instead focusing his attention on the jury, who sat gripped by his testimony.
The author said he had just sat down in his armchair on stage at the Chautauqua Institute's amphitheatre to begin his conversation with Henry Reese, his friend and founder of City of Asylum, when the attack unfolded.
'I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right hand side,' Sir Rushdie said, adding: 'I only saw him at the last minute.'
Describing the figure, he said he was wearing black clothes, a black face mask and was dark haired.
'I was very struck by his eyes which were dark and seemed very ferocious to me,' Sir Salman said. A defence lawyer for Matar objected to the characterisation, and Judge David Foley struck the answer from the very record.
He said the assailant 'hit me very hard... on the lower part of my face, my jawline and my neck', gesturing with his hands.
'Initially, I thought he had punched me. I thought he was hitting me with his fist. But very soon afterwards I saw quite a very large quantity of blood pouring out onto my clothes, and by that time he was hitting me repeatedly. Stabbing, slashing,' he said.
'I struggled to my feet to try to get away from him,' he said, but his assailant was above him. He was stabbed five or six times while he sat in the chair, including the most 'painfully and most dangerously' in his right eye, which blinded it.
'I was screaming because of the pain and I couldn't see out of the eye,' he said.
'At some point I put up my left hand to try and protect myself and he stuck the knife in that,' he added, noting that it had severed all of the tendons on his hand and almost all of the nerves.
It was 'intensely painful,' he said, and he was 'yelling about that too'.
'He was trying to hit me as many times as possible, strike me as many times as possible,' he said.
The Satanic Verses author was emotionless as he went into graphic detail describing his injuries from top to bottom for the jury. Slowly tracing the scars across his head, he said there was a 'slash' to his forehead.
'There's a scar visible on the left hand side here, slash wound here,' he added as he ran his fingers over the scar on the left side of his mouth.
He described further injuries to his neck, including one which ran 'left to right across my neck... that was a slash wound'.
There was also a cut to his tongue which had to be treated with half a dozen stitches, but he said he was unsure whether this had been caused by him biting his own tongue.
'There are three puncture wounds down the middle of my chest,' Sir Salman added, miming a stabbing motion with his hand three times, which he says 'fortunately' did not damage the heart.
Sir Salman described feeling a 'sense of great pain and shock and an awareness of the enormous quantity of blood I was lying in, a lake of blood that was clearly my own blood that was spreading outwards'.
'Henry Reese ran across the stage and tackled the individual and after that a number of members of the audience… also came up on stage to help,' he said.
'I was lying on the ground in pain… I was aware of a small pile of people to my right essentially subduing the attacker and thanks that I guess I survived.'
He added: 'It occurred to me quite clearly that I was dying, that was my predominant thought.'
A voice called out for a pair of scissors to cut his clothes off and see where the blood was coming from. He then described being wheeled out on a stretcher and airlifted to the trauma unit in Hamot hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he went into surgery for 'many hours'.
The author was put on a ventilator for 24 hours, and when he regained consciousness that evening he began answering yes or no questions with his feet.
The gash to his neck was 'so bad that it had to be held together by metal staples'. He was left 'extremely weak' after losing an 'enormous amount of blood' that he was unable to sit up.
During his 17 days he had a 'painful' operation to have his eyelid stitched together. He was then transferred to the Rusk rehab centre in New York, where he spent a further three weeks recovering.
Now, two-and-a-half years later, Sir Salman said he has recovered only 75 to 80 per cent. He is not as 'energetic' or 'strong' as he used to be, his left hand has not fully recovered – he only has feeling in his thumb and index finger.
He had written his book, Knife 'as a result of these events as a way for me to understand and deal with them,' he added.
Sir Salman's attack came three decades after Ayatollah Khomeini, the former Iranian supreme leader, issued a fatwa calling for his execution for The Satanic Verses, which he deemed blasphemous to the prophet Muhammad.
In a brief cross-examination, assistant public defender Lynn Schaffer brought up Sir Salman's appearance in Bridget Jones, with the author joking it was his 'most important work'.
Wearing extravagantly patterned tights, she asked Sir Salman if she believed in freedom of expression, freedom of speech, if he engages in satire and if he believes in due process and the right to a jury trial. He said he did.
The author agreed that trauma can impact the way we remember things, and said he had a 'false memory that when I saw the attacker I stood up to face him'.
Sir Salman agreed he would characterise the attack as an assault. He also confirmed that he had said before the attack that his biggest fear was becoming blind.
Following his extraordinary testimony, which lasted under two hours, Sir Salman stood up and walked back across the maroon carpet towards his wife. Matar did not look up.
The trial continues.
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