A New York court has heard how Salman Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly in a frenzied 2022 assault by an attacker who came “dangerously close to committing murder”.
Hadi Matar, a 27-year-old Lebanese-American from New Jersey, was heard saying “Free Palestine” as he was led into the courtroom in Chautauqua Lake on Monday for opening statements in his trial.
Matar is accused of stabbing Rushdie more than a dozen times in front of a lecture audience at the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater on 12 August 2022.
Rushdie, the celebrated Indian-born British-American author, has faced death threats since his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was declared blasphemous by Iran’s supreme leader.
The Booker Prize-winning author was about to speak about keeping writers safe from harm at the 2022 event when Matar ran toward him on the stage and “plunged” a knife into him repeatedly, District Attorney Jason Schmidt told the jury.
Schmidt said Matar approached the stage and, “without hesitation upon reaching Mr Rushdie, this man very deliberately, forcefully and efficiently with speed plunged the knife into Mr Rushdie over and over and over and over again”.
Rushdie was stabbed in the neck, stomach, chest, hand, and right eye, leaving him partially blind and with permanent damage to one hand.
Matar has been charged with assault and attempted murder and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted. He has pleaded not guilty and refused a plea deal. He also faces federal terrorism charges.
Schmidt told the court that the attack came “so fast” and “so unexpectedly” that Rushdie was still seated in his chair even after the first stab wounds were inflicted, according to The Telegraph.
“It all happened so fast that even the person under attack … didn’t even register immediately what was happening,” he explained.
Schmidt added that Matar “was seemingly on a mission in the uninterrupted direct and rapid manner” in which he carried out the attack.
Matar came “dangerously close to committing murder,” Schmidt told the court, explaining that Rushdie “lay on the ground bleeding out” and “had been stabbed straight through the right eye, severing the optic nerve”.
Schmidt said that Matar “almost succeeded in killing Mr Rushdie” and that during the trial, they would use Matar’s “own words” to help prove his intent beyond reasonable doubt.
Rushdie, now 77, is expected to testify against Matar, bringing the writer face to face with his knife-wielding attacker for the first time in more than two years.
Matar’s defense faced a challenging start after it was announced that his lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, was hospitalized with an undisclosed illness and would not attend the start of the trial. Judge David Foley refused a defense request to postpone opening statements, instead instructing an associate of Barone to deliver the defense’s opening statement in his place.
Assistant public defender Lynn Schaffer told the jury in her opening statement that prosecutors couldn’t prove Matar’s guilt, even with videos and photos. She said the case is not as straightforward as the prosecution portrayed.
“No matter what you knew coming in here, none of that information ever told you why and none of that information that you get from the district attorney is going to tell you why,” she said.
“The elements of a crime are more than just something really bad happened … Something bad did happen, something very bad did happen, but the DA has to prove something more than that, and something much more specific than that,” she added.
Schaffer also suggested that the guest passes for the Chautauqua Institution found in Matar’s backpack are “reflective of an intent to come and watch a lecture, come and watch a show”.
The first witness was Deborah Moore Kushmaul, a Chautauqua Institution administrator who said an “institution reverend” handed her the knife after she rushed toward the stage. She immediately gave the weapon to law enforcement.
“The amphitheatre became full of sound, and in the first seconds I heard it I wasn’t sure if it was screaming or laughing or both,” she said.
Kushmaul described seeing a lot of blood and people “piled” on the stage in the aftermath of the attack and “knew something terrible had happened.”
The second witness was Jordan Steves, the media relations coordinator at the Chautauqua Institution, who described to the jury how he tackled the assailant on stage.
“I could see on the monitor some swinging of arms and it became violent,” Steves testified about seeing the violent interaction on the live stream of the event.
He said that’s when he ran onto the stage and saw a “pile of dark clothing, two individuals.”
“I ran as fast as I could, lowered my shoulder and got as much of him with as much of me as a I could to disrupt what was happening.”
He said he remembers seeing that Rushdie was “covered in blood” as people from the audience and backstage began attending to him.
Cross examination by the defense will continue on Tuesday morning.
The trial, expected to last a week to 10 days, is being held in Mayville, a village in western New York with a population of under 1,500 people.
