Novelist Salman Rushdie has described the moment a knife-wielding attacker stormed on stage and attempted to kill him in a frenzied attack that left him blind in one eye.
The Satanic Verses author on Tuesday told jurors at the trial of his alleged attacker, 23-year-old American-Lebanese Hadi Matar, that Matar “was stabbing and slashing” at him.
“I was aware of this person rushing at me on my right-hand side,” he said, recounting how he was about to speak at an arts event in New York State in August 2022.
“I only saw him at the last minute.”
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that, I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie said, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood”.
He said it “occurred to me I was dying” before he was stretchered out of the cultural centre and helicoptered to a trauma hospital.
On Tuesday, Rushdie nodded and waved at his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who was in court for her husband’s testimony on the second day of the trial.
Matar’s legal team have sought to prevent witnesses from characterising Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran’s 1989 issuing of a fatwa that called for his murder over supposed blasphemy in The Satanic Verses.
Matar is accused of stabbing Rushdie about 10 times with a 6-inch (15cm) blade.
As he did on the trial’s opening day, Matar said, “Palestine will be free”, as he was led into court Tuesday. He did not react as Rushdie began his evidence, biting his nails during the testimony.
Rushdie, who wore distinctive glasses polarised in one lens to mask his damaged eye, described his treatment and current health.
“The injuries were very serious and it took a long time to recover… the gash [in my neck] was so deep, it had to be held together with metal staples,” he said.
Matar previously told media he had only read two pages of The Satanic Verses but believed the author had “attacked Islam”.
New York-based British-American Rushdie, now 77, was rescued by bystanders.
Venue employee Jordan Steves told the court Monday how he launched himself “with my right shoulder with as much force as I could manage” to help others subdue the attacker.
He pointed to Matar, sitting just feet away in the ornate courtroom, when asked to identify the attacker.
Steves’s colleague Deborah Moore Kushmaul said she picked up the discarded knife and gave it to police.
The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye was severed, and he told the court that “it was decided the eye would be stitched shut to allow it to moisturise. It was quite a painful operation – which I don’t recommend.”
Asked to describe the intensity of the pain over the attack, he said it was “a 10” out of 10.
His Adam’s apple was also partially lacerated, and his liver and small bowel penetrated.
“The first thing I said on regaining the ability of speech was, ‘I can speak’,” he said to stifled laughter from jurors.
“How do you squeeze toothpaste onto a toothbrush with only one hand?” he explained when asked about injuries to his hand received as he tried to defend himself.
Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for a decade after the 1989 fatwa, but for the past 20 years – until the attack – he lived relatively normally in New York.
He became the centre of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable in any circumstances.
Last year, he published a memoir, called Knife, in which he recounted the near-death experience.
One of Matar’s lawyers, Lynn Schaffer, said on Monday that prosecutors would seek to present the case as “open and shut” – but warned that police had made assumptions about Matar.
The accused reportedly became more withdrawn and hardline in his outlook following a 2018 trip to the Middle East.
The Iran-backed Lebanese armed organisation Hezbollah had endorsed the fatwa, the FBI has said, and Matar faces a separate prosecution in federal court on terrorism charges.
Iran has denied any link to the attacker and said only that Rushdie was to blame for the incident.
