(11 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY: MUST CREDIT ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
ASSOCIATED PRESS – MUST CREDIT ELIZABETH WILLIAMS
Mayville, New York – 11 February 2025
1. STILL: In this courtroom sketch, Hadi Matar, second from left, stares at Salman Rushdie as he walks into court to testify at Chautauqua County Court
2. STILL: In this courtroom sketch, District Attorney Jason Schmidt, left, questions Salman Rushdie, right, on the witness stand, as Judge David Foley presides during the trial of Hadi Matar
3. STILL: In this courtroom sketch, Salman Rushdie testifies on the witness stand, during the trial of Hadi Matar
STORYLINE:
Salman Rushdie described in graphic detail Tuesday the frenzied moments in 2022 when a masked man rushed at him on a stage in western New York and repeatedly slashed him with a knife, leaving him with terrible injuries and fearful he would die.
Rushdie took the stand during the second day of testimony at the trial of Hadi Matar, 27, who has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault in the attack that also wounded another man. It was the first time since the stabbing that the 77-year-old author found himself in the same room as the man accused of trying to kill him.
Rushdie recalled feeling “a sense of great pain and shock, and aware of the fact that there was an enormous quantity of blood that I was lying in" after the attack.
“It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought,” he said, adding that the people who subdued his assailant likely saved his life.
As he recounted the attack, his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, cried from her seat in the courtroom’s second row.
“I only saw him at the last minute,” Rushdie said of the man who rushed across the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed him repeatedly with a 10-inch blade.
“I was aware of someone wearing black clothes, or dark clothes and a black face mask. I was very struck by his eyes, which were dark and seemed very ferocious."
Rushdie said he first thought his knife-wielding attacker was striking him with a fist.
“But I saw a large quantity of blood pouring onto my clothes,” he said. “He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing.”
Rushdie said he was struck again in his chest and torso and stabbed in his chest as he struggled to get away.
“I was very badly injured. I couldn’t stand up any more. I fell down," he said.
Rushdie was blinded in one eye in the attack.
He spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center, where he had to re-learn basic skills like squeezing toothpaste from a tube. He detailed his months of recovery in a memoir released last year.
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