The British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for the first time ever shares the details of the stabbing attack with the court.
According to CNN, the author on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, described the moments of the attack in detail and showed the jury his blinded right eye injuries.
During the second day of the trial, Rushdie testified at the courtroom in Mayville, a few miles north of the Chautauqua Institution, the site where the man, Hadi Matar, tried to murder him at a talk at a rural New York venue on August 12, 2022.
He recounted the moments of the attack saying, “I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right hand side. He hit me very hard. 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.”
The 77-year-old also removed his spectacles and turned to the jury and told that stabbing in his now blinded right eye was the most dangerous.
“You can see that’s what’s left of it. There’s no vision in the eye at all. I was very struck by his eyes, which were dark and seemed very ferocious to me. He struck me a number of times, another half a dozen times. At some point I thought I was dying. That was my immediate thought,” he added.
The 26-year-old man who stabbed Rushdie about 15 times: in the head, neck, torso, and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines has been charged with second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault.
