Salman Rushdie’s attacker was convicted Friday of attempted murder for stabbing the famed author in a bloody horror that left him blind in one eye.
Knifeman Hadi Matar, 26, was found guilty by a Chautauqua County, New York, jury of rushing a stage where Rushdie, 77, was giving a lecture at the Chautauqua Institute on Aug. 12, 2022, in a bid to kill the novelist.
Matar — who was born in America but also has Lebanese citizenship — was also found guilty of assault and faces up to 25 years at his sentencing.
The verdict comes after seven days of testimony that featured Rushdie himself recounting the harrowing attack and showing jurors his sightless right eye, which he now keeps hidden under the darkened lens of his eyeglasses.
Rushdie told the panelists about the “ferocious” look in Matar’s eyes when he charged and how he believed he would have died that day if not for good Samaritans who took Matar down.
Other witnesses, including attendees of the lecture and staff from the institute, testified about the blood and chaos that was unleashed by Matar’s ambush.
Chautauqua Institute Chief Program Officer Deborah Moore Kushmaul recalled seeing blood, hearing the screams of audience members, and seeing people rushing the stage to intervene.
“I saw Salman Rushdie on the floor. I saw other people trying to restrain the attacker,” Kushmaul recalled.
During closing arguments Friday, prosecutors played a slow-motion clip of the incident showing a figure come from the audience and onto the stage before charging at the Booker Prize-winning author.
“I want you to look at the unprovoked nature of this attack,” District Attorney Jason Schmidt told the jury. “I want you to look at the targeted nature of the attack. There were a lot of people around that day but there was only one person who was targeted.”
But Matar’s defense attorney Andrew Brautigan told the panelists the prosecution hadn’t sufficiently proven that his client meant to kill Rushdie — a legal distinction necessary for Matar to be found guilty of the higher charge of attempted murder.
“You will agree something bad happened to Mr. Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr. Matar’s conscious objective was,” Brautigan argued. “The testimony you have heard doesn’t establish anything more than a chaotic noisy outburst that occurred that injured Mr. Rushdie.”
Schmidt said you didn’t need to be able to read Matar’s mind to know that he would have known “if you’re going to stab someone 10 or 15 times … it’s going to result in a fatality.”
Rushdie was not only blinded in his eye but also suffered nerve and liver damage, all of which he barely survived. He was in a hospital and rehab center for over five weeks recovering from the injuries, which he documented in a 2024 memoir called “Knife.”
Henry Reese — the founder of the City Of Asylum Pittsburgh — testified about how he was on stage speaking with Rushdie and was also injured in the melee. Matar was charged with assault for allegedly slashing Reese in the forehead, leaving him with a gash.
Another of Matar’s defense lawyers, Nathaniel Barone, told reporters Thursday that his client wouldn’t have been charged with the higher attempted-murder charge but for Rushdie’s fame.
“We think that it became an attempted murder because of the notoriety of the alleged victim in the case,” Barone said after testimony wrapped in the case. “That’s been it from the very beginning. It’s been nothing more, nothing less. And it’s for publicity purposes. It’s for self-interest purposes.”
Iran called for Rushdie’s death in 1989 over his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which pushed him into hiding for about a decade until the Middle Eastern country eventually announced it would not enforce the murder decree.
Matar — of Fairfield, New Jersey — still faces federal terrorism-related charges related to the attack.
With Post wires