‘I thought he had punched me’: Novelist Salman Rushdie takes stand in trial of his accused stabber

The novelist Salman Rushdie showed a jury his blinded right eye on Tuesday as he testified against the man charged with trying to murder him at a talk at a rural New York venue in 2022.

The novelist Salman Rushdie showed a jury his blinded right eye on Tuesday as he testified against the man charged with trying to murder him at a talk at a rural New York venue in 2022. Hadi Matar, 26, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault brought by the Chautauqua County district attorney. Rushdie walked into the courtroom dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and gray tie. The right lens of his spectacles was blacked out, masking the eye, which his attacker’s knife had pierced through to the optic nerve. “I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right hand side,” Rushdie testified at the courtroom in Mayville, a few miles north of the Chautauqua Institution, the site of his attack on August 12, 2022. “He hit me very hard,” Rushdie said. “Initially, I thought he had punched me. I thought he was hitting me with his fist. But very soon afterwards I saw really quite a very large quantity of blood pouring out onto my clothes, and by that time he was hitting me repeatedly. Stabbing, slashing.” Matar, dressed in a baggy light blue shirt, sat with his defense lawyers nearby. In his memoir about the attack, Rushdie imagined questioning Matar about the attack and wrote that he was looking forward to facing him in a courtroom.