MAYVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — Lawyers are set to deliver their closing arguments Friday in the trial of a New Jersey man charged with trying to kill Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in a knife attack that left the author blind in one eye and with other serious injuries.
Hadi Matar, 27, is charged with attempted murder and assault in the August 2022 attack at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.
Rushdie, 77, was the key witness during testimony that began last week. The Booker Prize-winning author told jurors he thought he was dying when a masked stranger ran onto the stage and stabbed and slashed at him until being tackled by bystanders. Rushdie showed jurors his now-blinded right eye, usually hidden behind a darkened eyeglass lens.
Jurors also heard from a trauma surgeon who said Rushdie’s injuries would have been fatal without quick treatment, and a law enforcement officer who said Matar was calm and cooperative in his custody.
They were shown video of the assault and aftermath that was captured from multiple angles by Chautauqua Institution cameras. The recordings also picked up the gasps and screams from audience members who had been seated to hear Rushdie speak with City of Asylum Pittsburgh founder Henry Reese about keeping writers safe. Reese suffered a gash to his forehead.
From the witness stand, institution staff and others present that day pointed to Matar as the assailant.
Stabbed and slashed more than a dozen times in the head, throat, torso, thigh and hand, Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center. He detailed his long and painful recovery in his 2024 memoir, “Knife.”
Throughout the trial, Matar often took notes with a pen and sometimes laughed or smiled with defense attorneys during breaks in testimony.
His lawyers declined to call any witnesses of their own and Matar did not testify in his defense. Instead, the attorneys challenged prosecution witnesses as part of a strategy intended to cast doubt on whether Matar intended to kill, and not just injure, Rushdie. The distinction is important for an attempted murder conviction.
Matar had with him knives, not a gun or bomb, his attorneys said. And Rushdie’s heart and lungs were uninjured, they noted in response to testimony that the injuries were life-threatening.
Public Defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar likely would have faced a lesser charge of assault were it not for Rushdie’s celebrity.
“We think that it became an attempted murder because of the notoriety of the alleged victim in the case,” Barone told reporters after testimony concluded Thursday. “That’s been it from the very beginning. It’s been nothing more, nothing less. And it’s for publicity purposes. It’s for self-interest purposes.”
A separate federal indictment alleges that Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death. Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he had traveled freely over the past quarter century.
A trial on the federal terrorism-related charges will be scheduled in U.S. District Court in Buffalo.
