‘I Was Dying’: Salman Rushdie Testifies About Terrifying Stabbing Attack

Salman Rushdie was preparing to give a talk to more than 1,000 people in an idyllic amphitheater along Chautauqua Lake when he suddenly became aware of a figure onstage, rushing toward him.

“I was very struck by his eyes,” Mr. Rushdie, the renowned author, said. They were dark, he said. And ferocious.

Before he could react, a man was upon him, striking his cheek, his jaw, his neck and, “most painfully and most dangerously,” his right eye. At first, Mr. Rushdie said, he thought he was being punched. But then he became aware of “a very large quantity of blood pouring out onto my clothes.”

He had actually been stabbed repeatedly around his head and face.

Mr. Rushdie testified on Tuesday in the trial of Hadi Matar, the man on trial in the knife attack the author believed would kill him, coming face to face with the man accused of attempting to murder him. He gave jurors a vivid account of the stabbing.

The stab to his eye was “intensely painful,” Mr. Rushdie said. “And after that I was screaming because of the pain.”

The knife severed his optic nerve, he said, leaving the eye blind.

“That’s what’s left of it,” he told jurors, lifting the distinctive eyeglasses he has worn in public since the attack. One lens is clear, and the other is black. Behind the black lens, his ruined eye appeared mostly closed.

The attack occurred during a summertime arts conference at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York in 2022, as Mr. Rushdie was preparing to deliver a lecture on asylum for exiled writers.

After he was struck five or six times in his face and head, Mr. Rushdie told the jury, he attempted to flee, but the attack continued. He was stabbed and slashed about 15 times, he said.

At several points in his testimony, Mr. Rushdie pointed to places on his body where he was injured: his cheek, his chest, his throat, his hand, his waist.

He collapsed, and around half a minute after the attack began, the assailant was pulled off him by bystanders and by Ralph Henry Reese, one of the founders of a project that offers refuge for writers who was onstage with Mr. Rushdie. On the ground, in a pool of blood, Mr. Rushdie said he was overtaken by “a sense of great pain and shock.”

“It occurred to me quite clearly that I was dying,” he said. “And that was my predominant thought.”

To his right, he said, he was aware of “a small pile of people” who had descended on the attacker.

“Thanks to that,” he said, “I guess I survived.”

From the amphitheater, Mr. Rushdie was taken by helicopter to a hospital with a trauma clinic in Erie, Pa. He spent 17 days there, he said, before he was transferred to N.Y.U. Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation center in New York City, where he stayed for nearly a month.

The attack left him with lasting scars, including a wound on his lip that has made it hard for him to pronounce some words, he said. A stab wound to his left hand severed tendons and damaged nerves. Other damage is not as visible.

“I am not as energetic as I used to be,” Mr. Rushdie, 77, said. “I am not as physically strong as I used to be.”

He delivered his testimony steadily, speaking clearly and betraying little emotion. He gesticulated as he spoke, using his scarred left hand, then his right.

The courtroom in the Chautauqua County Courthouse, a pillared building from the early 1900s in downtown Mayville, N.Y., was nearly full during Mr. Rushdie’s testimony. Journalists filled the first row of wooden benches, and onlookers sat behind them. From the second row, Mr. Rushdie’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, listened to her husband’s account of the attack. At the prosecutor’s request, the space in front of her was left empty, giving Ms. Griffiths a direct line of sight to the witness stand.

Mr. Rushdie lived in hiding after the Iranian government issued a fatwa in 1989 directing Muslims to kill him following the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which fictionalized aspects of the Prophet Muhammad’s life.

For the first decade under the fatwa, Mr. Rushdie lived in seclusion in London with round-the-clock security. But for the last 20 years, Mr. Rushdie had lived an almost normal life in New York City.

In a memoir published in April of last year about the attack and his recovery, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” Mr. Rushdie writes an imagined conversation with his assailant. He wanted to meet him, he wrote.

“I wanted to sit in a room with him and say, ‘Tell me about it,’” he wrote. “I wanted him to look me in my (one remaining) eye and tell me the truth.”

In the courtroom, Mr. Rushdie did not get that chance. Mr. Matar, the man accused of wielding the knife, largely avoided looking at the author. For the most part, Mr. Matar’s eyes remained downcast, glancing occasionally at Jason Schmidt, the district attorney, and in the direction of the jury.

Lynn Schaffer, the lawyer representing Mr. Matar, asked Mr. Rushdie on cross-examination whether he thought the trauma of the experience might have clouded his memory. He acknowledged he had “some false memories,” including a mistaken recollection that “when I saw the attacker, I stood up to face him.”

In addition to attempted murder, Mr. Matar, 27, also faces an assault charge for a slash wound that Mr. Reese sustained. On Monday morning, Mr. Matar’s defense team told Judge David W. Foley that the lead defense lawyer, Nathaniel L. Barone II, had been hospitalized. Mr. Barone was absent again on Tuesday. In her opening statement, Ms. Schaffer asked the jury to keep an open mind about Mr. Matar’s innocence. Cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses has been relatively brief.

Prosecutors said that they expect the trial to last around two weeks.

Mr. Matar also faces federal terrorism-related charges. He is accused of offering “personnel, specifically himself, and services” to terrorists and of providing “material support and resources” to a terror group in Lebanon, according to the indictment.