Salman Rushdie too stunned to react when man started to stab him, court hears

Sir Salman Rushdie was so stunned when a masked man started to stab him on a stage in western New York that the author did not even try to fight back, a prosecutor said during opening statements of the alleged attacker’s attempted murder trial.

Sir Salman, 77, is expected to testify during the trial of Hadi Matar, bringing him face-to-face with his alleged attacker for the first time in more than two years.

The attack left Sir Salman seriously wounded and blind in one eye.

The Booker Prize-winning author had been about to present a lecture on keeping writers safe in August 2022 when Matar allegedly ran towards him on the stage at the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheatre.

District attorney Jason Schmidt told jurors the attack was swift and sudden. He said Matar bounded up a staircase to the stage and ran about 30 feet towards Sir Salman.

As the stabbing began, Sir Salman and fellow speaker Henry Reese were so stunned that they initially remained seated, the court heard.

“Without hesitation this man holding his knife… forcefully and efficiently in its speed, plunged the knife into Mr Rushdie over and over and over again,” Mr Schmidt said, “stabbing, swinging, slicing into Mr Rushdie’s head, his throat, his abdomen, his thigh” and a hand the author raised to protect himself, the court heard.

“It all happened so fast that even the person under attack, Mr Rushdie, and the person sitting next to him, Mr Reese, didn’t register what was happening,” Mr Schmidt said.

A Chautauqua Institution employee testified that he rushed from backstage to intervene when he saw a man was on stage violently swinging his arms at Sir Salman.

“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,” said Jordan Steves, who was the media relations co-ordinator.

Mr Steves, one of two witnesses to give evidence on Monday, identified Matar as the assailant.

Matar, wearing a blue shirt, looked on from the defence table, occasionally taking notes.

The Indian-born British-American author detailed the attack and his long, painful recovery in a memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, released last year.

Sir Salman had worried for his safety since his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses was denounced as blasphemous by many Muslims and led to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa calling for his death.

Sir Salman spent years in hiding, but had travelled freely over the past quarter of a century after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree.

The trial is taking place as the 36th anniversary of the fatwa — on February 14, 1989 — approaches.

Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, is charged with attempted murder and assault. He has pleaded not guilty.

“This is not a case of mistaken identity,” Mr Schmidt said. “Mr Matar is the person who attacked Mr Rushdie without provocation.”

Matar’s defence faced a challenging start after it was announced that his lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, was taken to hospital with an undisclosed illness and would not attend the start of the trial.

Judge David Foley refused a defence request to postpone opening statements, instead instructing an associate of Mr Barone to deliver the defence’s opening statement in his place.

Assistant public defender Lynn Schaffer told jurors that prosecutors would be unable to prove Matar’s guilt, even using video recordings and photos. She said the case is not as straightforward as the prosecution portrayed.

“The elements of the crime are more than ‘something really bad happened’ — they’re more defined,” Ms Shaffer said. “Something bad did happen, something very bad did happen, but the district attorney has to prove much more than that.”

“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 trial will last up to two weeks, the lawyers said.

The trial’s first witness was a Chautauqua Institution administrator who said she was handed the knife by an institution reverend after she rushed towards the stage.

Deborah Moore Kushmaul said she immediately gave it to a law enforcement officer.

In a separate indictment, federal authorities allege Matar was motivated by a terrorist organisation’s endorsement of a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.

A later trial on the federal charges — terrorism transcending national boundaries, providing material support to terrorists and attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organisation — will be scheduled in the US District Court in Buffalo.