Novelist Salman Rushdie faces his accused stabber in New York courtroom

Salman Rushdie spoke calmly and with occasional dry humor as he testified on Tuesday against the man accused of trying to murder him, the first time the two have been in the same place since the 2022 knife attack on the novelist onstage at a New York arts institute.

Hadi Matar, 26, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault.

Rushdie, 77, walked into the courtroom dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and gray tie. Two sheriff's deputies stood at alert by Matar, seated at a table with his team of public defenders. The right lens of Rushdie's spectacles was blacked out, masking the eye, which his attacker's knife had pierced through to the optic nerve.

"I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right hand side," Rushdie testified in a courtroom in Mayville, a few miles north of the Chautauqua Institution, the lakeside rural arts haven where he was attacked on Aug. 12, 2022.

The controversial writer, for decades the target of death threats, had been seated onstage at the institution's outdoor amphitheater that morning, about to give a talk on keeping writers safe from harm.

"He hit me very hard," Rushdie 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."

Defendant Hadi Matar arrives for his trial on charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault dating to an attack on Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, at Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, U.S. February 11, 2025.Reuters

Matar, dressed in a baggy blue shirt, sometimes looked at Rushdie, and filled the page of a yellow legal pad with dark ink. In his memoir about the attack, Rushdie wrote that he was looking forward to facing him in a courtroom.

Soon after the attack, Matar, a U.S.-Lebanese dual citizen from New Jersey, told the "New York Post" in a jailhouse interview that he disliked Rushdie because he believed the writer had insulted Islam, and said he was surprised that Rushdie survived.

His defense lawyers have not disputed that Matar was in the amphitheater that day but have told the jury that the prosecutor's evidence will not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Matar had the necessary criminal intent to be convicted of attempted murder.

Born in India into a Muslim Kashmiri family, Rushdie spent most of the 1990s in hiding in the UK after receiving death threats over his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses."

The novel prompted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, to issue a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie for what he said was blasphemy against Islam.

Onstage at the Institution, Rushdie was stabbed about 15 times: in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines, nearly killing him, according to his surgeons.

Rushdie said the stabbing in his right eye, which almost penetrated his brain, was the most dangerous.

"You can see that's what's left of it," Rushdie said, removing his spectacles and turning to the jury. "There's no vision in the eye at all." He also pointed out scars on his neck and left hand.

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