Prosecutors began their case against Hadi Matar, the man accused of attacking the author Salman Rushdie, with a vivid and gruesome description of the stabbing they said came perilously close to killing him.
Matar, a 27-year-old Lebanese American, is charged with attempted murder and assault over the stabbing attack on the author on stage at an arts festival in August 2022. The 77-year-old Rushdie was grievously injured in the attack and lost sight in one eye.
In opening statements on Monday, the prosecutor Jason Schmidt told jurors in Chautauqua county court that Matar, from Fairview, New Jersey, had “come dangerously close to committing murder” when he assaulted Rushdie with a knife.
Matar, Schmidt said, had approached Rushdie in a “direct and rapid manner” as he sat on the stage and began his assault “without hesitation, deliberately, forcefully, efficiently and with speed”.
The attack, Schmidt continued, “came so fast and unexpectedly that he [Rushdie] continued to sit in his chair … he didn’t register what was happening”. The assault, Schmidt said, continued after Rushdie got up to run. Members of the audience tackled Matar and held him down until a state trooper patrolling nearby arrived.
After a vivid description of the wounds Rushdie had received to his neck, face and abdomen, the prosecutor said the author was rushed to a nearby trauma center where was found to be “losing blood so rapidly he was in hemorrhagic shock from blood loss”.
Schmidt said anyone in Rushdie’s condition who had not received level-one trauma care would have died.
The long-awaited trial has attracted the world’s media to the small town of Mayville in western New York state. As he entered the courtroom Matar said: “Free Palestine.” The defendant, who is dressed in a blue untucked shirt and trousers, faces a 25-year maximum sentence if convicted.
The trial was briefly thrown into question when the defense team revealed that Matar’s lead attorney, Nathaniel Barone, had been hospitalized overnight, but Judge David Foley denied a defense request to delay the start of the trial.
Public defender Lynn Schaffer, standing in for Barone, said it was not an open-and-shut case against Matar – and reasonable doubt existed.
The case is not a “whodunnit, not an Agatha Christie novel”, Schaffer told the court. “The prosecution will want you to believe this is straightforward …open and shut … this case on video, nothing to see here.”
But, she added, referring to Schmidt, “Don’t believe him – it’s not that simple. Nothing is that simple in life.”
Schaffer 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.”
Using the analogy of Sunday’s Super Bowl, Schaffer said it was not possible to know “what’s inside any of those players’ minds” despite the camera angles – an apparent reference to video of the attack the prosecution has said it would show to jurors.
Deborah Moore Kushmaul, program director at the Chautauqua Institution and the first witness for the prosecution, said Rushdie had been booked to speak on a theme of “shelter and redefining home”. Rushdie may be called by the prosecution on Tuesday, according to reports.
In a jailhouse interview soon after he was detained, Matar told the New York Post he had only read two pages of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which initiated a fatwa against the author issued in 1989 by Iran’s then leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
Matar, who has pleaded not guilty and will be tried on federal terrorism-related charges at a later date, told the outlet that he believed Rushdie had “attacked Islam”.
Rushdie, who lived with security protection in London for a decade before moving to New York to live under less constrained circumstances, wrote in Knife, a meditative account of the attack, that he does not regret the earlier novel.
“I am proud of the work I’ve done, and that very much includes The Satanic Verses. If anyone’s looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here,” he wrote.
But before the incident, he dreamed of being attacked by a gladiator with a spear in a Roman amphitheater. He later said he thought: “Don’t be silly. It’s a dream.”
But he also questioned his apparent passivity under the attack.
“Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I run? I just stood there like a piñata and let him smash me,” Rushdie wrote in Knife. “It didn’t feel dramatic, or particularly awful. It just felt probable … matter-of-fact.”
