The trial of the man charged with attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie at a New York lecture is due to begin on Tuesday with jury selection.
Hadi Matar, 26, can be seen in cellphone videos rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York in August 2022 as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience. Rushdie, 77, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in an attack that led to the loss of his right eye and damaged his liver.
Matar has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault. Rushdie, who has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, is due to be among the first witnesses to testify at the trial.
Rushdie has published a memoir about the attack and said in interviews he believed he was going to die on the Chautauqua Institution’s stage.
Rushdie, who was raised in a Muslim Kashmiri family, went into hiding under the protection of British police in 1989 after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced The Satanic Verses to be blasphemous. Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious edict, called upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication, leading to a multimillion-dollar bounty.
The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie ended his years as a recluse, becoming a fixture of literary parties in New York City, where he lives.
After the attack, Matar told the New York Post that he traveled from his home in New Jersey after seeing the Rushdie event advertised because he disliked the novelist, saying Rushdie had attacked Islam. Matar, a dual citizen of his native US and Lebanon, said in the interview that he was surprised that Rushdie survived, the Post reported.
The trial was postponed from January 2023, when Matar’s defense team requested the manuscript of Rushdie’s memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and again in October, after Matar’s defense appealed for a change of venue, arguing that an impartial jury of Matar’s peers could not be found in Chautauqua county.
The trial is being held at the Chautauqua county court in Mayville, a town of about 1,500 people near the Canadian border. If convicted of attempted murder, Matar faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
Matar is also facing federal charges in which prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in western New York accused him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism and of providing material support to the armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization. Matar has pleaded not guilty to that charge as well. His mother has indicated he was radicalized during a trip to see his father in Lebanon in 2018.
Rushdie described the attack in Knife. “I can still see the moment in slow motion,” he wrote. “In the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low: a squat missile.”
Jason Schmidt, the prosecutor, plans to call the author as a witness. The prosecutorial team is arguing that Matar’s attack was not random but motivated by the fatwa issued by Iran’s leadership against Rushdie over The Satanic Verses.
