A 27-year-old New Jersey man with alleged sympathies towards Iran is on trial for the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie.
Hadi Matar is accused of stabbing the acclaimed British-Indian author at least a dozen times onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York state on August 12, 2022, as he prepared to deliver a lecture.
Matar, who according to eyewitnesses was dressed all in black and wore a black mask, was restrained by audience members before being arrested by a New York State trooper and sheriff’s deputy.
He was carrying a backpack and electronic device, and had a fake New Jersey driver’s license on him when arrested, law enforcement officials said.
Now Matar is before a jury for the attack and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Who is Hadi Matar?
Matar is a United States citizen who was born in the US to parents who emigrated from Yaroun in southern Lebanon.
Yaroun, near the Israeli border, is a stronghold of the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah, and portraits of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders are displayed throughout the village, according to the Associated Press.
An official from Yaroun said that Matar is a Shiite and also holds Lebanese citizenship, according to wire agencies.
Law enforcement sources told NBC News that Matar was born in California and had moved to Fairview, New Jersey in the last few years where he lived with his mother Silvana Fardos and 14-year-old twin sisters.
Fardos told DailyMail.com that she learned about the attack when her daughter called her to inform her about FBI agents at her door.
Federal agents had seized items from her son’s basement apartment – including a computer, books and knives, she said.
Fardos said that she had disowned her son and that he was “responsible for his actions”.
Matar’s parents divorced in 2004 and his father moved back to Lebanon.
He appeared to change after taking a month-long trip to Lebanon to stay with his father in 2018, his mother said.
Prior to the trip, he had been a “popular, loving” son, but upon his return, he became introverted and moved into an apartment in her basement. He began sleeping during the day and staying up all night.
“I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job. But instead, he locked himself in the basement. He had changed a lot, he didn’t say anything to me or his sisters for months,” Fardos told DailyMail.com.
Fardos noticed her son was becoming more religious when he questioned her about not introducing him to Islam at a young age.
“I didn’t push my kids into religion or force anything on my son. I don’t know anyone in Iran, all my family are here,” she told the outlet.
At the time, his father Hassan Matar, who lives in Yaroun, locked himself in his home and refused to speak about the stabbing, Reuters reported.
After the New York arrest, State Police Major Eugene Staniszewski said at a news conference that a motive for the attack was unclear.
Matar’s social media accounts indicated he held sympathies for Hezbollah and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, law enforcement sources told NBC News.
Iran’s former spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Rushdie after the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
The threat, which has never been rescinded, forced Rushdie into hiding for nearly a decade after his Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death in 1991, and a Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot outside his home in 1993.
The assault on Rushdie was celebrated in the Iranian media at the time.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani denied any link to the stabbing in a televised address and blamed the author and his supporters.
Matar has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault and is being held without bail at Chautauqua County Jail. His trial began on February 10, 2025.
Salman Rushdie ‘gravely’ wounded in attack
Rushdie was ‘gravely’ wounded in the attack. Rushdie was stabbed in the neck, stomach, chest, hand, and right eye, leaving him partially blind and with permanent damage to one hand.
He eventually lost his right eye and was left with permanent damage to one of his hands.
“Everything happened very quickly. I was stabbed repeatedly, and most painfully in my eye. I struggled to get away. I held up my hand in self-defense and was stabbed through that,” Rushdie testified on February 11.
Rushdie said that the knife severed all the tendons in his hand, and is not “fully repaired.”
Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center, where he had to re-learn basic skills like squeezing toothpaste from a tube. He detailed his months of recovery in a memoir released in 2024.
Suspect says he only read two pages of The Satanic Verses
Matar told The New York Post in a jailhouse video interview that he only ever read two pages of The Satanic Verses and admits he is “surprised” the author survived the knife attack.
“I read a couple pages. I didn’t read the whole thing cover to cover,” he told the Post about reading Rushdie’s controversial novel that saw Iranian leaders place a fatwah on the author’s head, ordering Muslims to kill him.
“When I heard he survived, I was surprised, I guess,” he told the Post.
The suspect, who is from New Jersey, praised Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the fatwah, but would not say if that is what inspired the attack.
“I respect the Ayatollah.. I think he’s a great person. That’s as far as I will say about that,” Matar told the newspaper.
The trial
More than two years after the attack, Matar is on for the attempted murder of Rushdie.
The now-27-year-old entered the New York courtroom on Tuesday for the first full day of testimony, chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Rushdie, now 77, took the stand just before the lunch break. It’s the first time the author has been in the same room as the suspect since the attack.
Matar intently scribbled on a yellow legal pad at the defense table while Rushdie avoided looking in his direction as he described how the attack unfolded.
“I only saw him at the last minute,” Rushdie said of the man who rushed across the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed him repeatedly with a 10-inch blade.
“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.”
Rushdie 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.”
When he was asked how many times he was stabbed, Rushdie answered: “I wasn’t keeping score.”
Rushdie recalled feeling “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” after the attack.
“It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought,” he said, adding that the people who subdued his assailant likely saved his life.
