The interviewer who tried to stop a stabbing attack on novelist Salman Rushdie’s alleged attacker at first thought it was a prank, he testified in court Thursday.
Henry Reese, 75, had just sat down to interview Rushdie when the author was stabbed in a frenzied knife attack in August 2022 in front of a lecture audience at Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater in western New York state.
Reese, the co-founder of City of Asylum Pittsburgh, a non-profit that provides support and sanctuary to persecuted writers, testified that he tried to stop the assault once he realized it wasn’t a prank.
“At some point it became real, and I got up and tried to stop the attacker,” he told jurors during the third day of testimony in the trial of Hadi Matar, the 27-year-old New Jersey man charged with trying to kill Rushdie and assaulting Reese.
Reese was left with a gash above his eye after intervening in the attack, which blinded Rushdie in one eye.
Rushdie said he likely survived because of the actions of Reese and other bystanders who tackled and subdued the attacker.
The author took the stand Tuesday morning and revealed how he believed he was about to die just after the harrowing knife attack.
It was the first time in two years that Rushdie faced his alleged stabber.
The celebrated Indian-born British-American author has faced death threats since his 1988 novelThe Satanic Verses was declared blasphemous by Iran’s then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in,” he told the court, recalling lying on the stage following the attack. “My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.”
Matar has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault.
He 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 was aware of this person rushing at me from my right-hand side. I was aware of someone in dark clothes … I was struck by his eyes which seemed dark and ferocious to me,” Rushdie testified.
“He hit me very hard around my jawline and neck. Initially, I thought he’d punched me with his fist, but very soon afterward I saw blood on my clothes,” he recalled.
Rushdie was stabbed in the neck, stomach, chest, hand, and right eye, suffering permanent damage to his eye and one hand.
Matar faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
AP contributed reporting
