Salman Rushdie confronts attacker in court: "I thought I was dying" 

Salman Rushdie took the stand Tuesday in the trial of the man accused of attempting to kill him, recounting in vivid detail how he believed he was about to die in the moments following the brutal knife attack.

The renowned British-American author has lived under the shadow of a fatwa since 1988, when Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared his novel The Satanic Verses blasphemous. On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was viciously stabbed in front of a live audience at the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater, an attack that left him blind in one eye and with life-altering injuries.

“I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in,” Rushdie told the court, describing the scene as he lay wounded on the stage. “My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.”

Facing his alleged attacker, 27-year-old Hadi Matar of New Jersey, for the first time in nearly two years, Rushdie gave testimony while Matar sat at the defense table, reportedly scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad. Matar has pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault.

Rushdie described how the assailant rushed toward him just before the attack: “I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right-hand side. I was aware of someone in dark clothes … I was struck by his eyes which seemed dark and ferocious to me.”

Recalling the first moments of the assault, he added: “He hit me very hard around my jawline and neck. Initially, I thought he’d punched me with his fist, but very soon afterward I saw blood on my clothes.”

Rushdie was stabbed in the neck, stomach, chest, hand, and right eye, leaving him partially blind and with permanent damage to one hand.

“Everything happened very quickly. I was stabbed repeatedly, and most painfully in my eye. I struggled to get away. I held up my hand in self-defense and was stabbed through that.”

“He was trying to strike me as many times as possible,” he testified, estimating that he had been struck 50 times by his assailant. “I was very badly injured and I couldn’t stand up anymore.”

Rushdie then removed his glasses and showed jurors “what’s left” of his eye, which is now a sewn-up eye socket beneath an eye patch, and said: “I was screaming because of the pain.”

“You can see that’s what’s left of it, there’s no vision in the eye at all,” he continued. “It was a stab wound in my eye and intensely painful and after that I was screaming because of the pain and I couldn’t see out the eye.”

The trial is expected to last a week to 10 days. Matar faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

The Independent contributed to this article.