In the moments after the stabbing attack that left him blind in one eye, the author Salman Rushdie lay in a pool of blood, certain that he would not survive. “It occurred to me quite clearly, that I was dying,” he said.
Mr. Rushdie testified on Tuesday in the trial of the man accused of attacking him, giving a vivid account of the stabbing and coming face to face with the man accused of attempting to murder him.
At the Chautauqua Institution on an August morning in 2022, Mr. Rushdie was preparing to give a lecture on asylum for exiled writers to an audience of more than 1,000 people. Suddenly, he said, he became aware of a man rushing toward him.
“I was very struck by his eyes which were dark and seemed very ferocious to me,” Mr. Rushdie said.
At first, he said, he thought he was being punched. But then he became aware of “a very large quantity of blood pouring out onto my clothes.”
The assailant was holding a knife and struck Mr. Rushdie with it five or six times around his head and face, including “most painfully and most dangerously a stab wound in my right eye,” Mr. Rushdie said.
“That’s what’s left of it,” he said, lifting the distinctive eyeglasses he has worn in public since the attack. One lens is clear, and the other is black. Behind the black lens, his ruined eye appeared mostly closed.
Mr. Rushdie told the jury that he attempted to flee, but the attack continued. He was stabbed and slashed about 15 times, he said.
At several points in his testimony, Mr. Rushdie pointed to places on his body where he was injured: his cheek, his chest, his throat, his hand, his waist.
He collapsed, and the assailant was pulled off him by bystanders and by Ralph Henry Reese, one of the founders of a project that offers refuge for writers who was onstage with Mr. Rushdie. On the ground, Mr. Rushdie said he was overtaken by “a sense of great pain and shock.”
It was his “predominant thought,” he said, that he was dying.
He also noticed “a small pile of people to my right essentially subduing the attacker.”
“Thanks to that,” he said, “I guess I survived.”
From the amphitheater, Mr. Rushdie was taken by helicopter to a hospital with a trauma clinic in Erie, Pa. He spent 17 days there, he said, before he was transferred to N.Y.U. Langone’s Rusk Rehabilitation center in New York City, where he stayed for nearly a month.
The attack left him with lasting scars, including a wound on his lip that has made it hard for him to pronounce some words, he said. A stab wound to his left hand severed tendons and damaged nerves. Other damage is not as visible.
“I am not as energetic as I used to be,” Mr. Rushdie said. “I am not as physically strong as I used to be.”
During his testimony, Mr. Rushdie’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, looked on from the second row, listening as her husband detailed his injuries and the pain he suffered.
In a memoir published this spring about the attack and his recovery, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” Mr. Rushdie writes an imagined conversation with his assailant. He wanted to meet him, he wrote.
“I wanted to sit in a room with him and say, ‘Tell me about it,’” he wrote. “I wanted him to look me in my (one remaining) eye and tell me the truth.”
In the courtroom, Mr. Rushdie did not get that chance. The man accused of wielding the knife, Hadi Matar, largely avoided looking at the author. For the most part, Mr. Matar’s eyes remained downcast, glancing occasionally at Jason Schmidt, the district attorney, and in the direction of the jury.
Lynn Schaffer, the lawyer representing Mr. Matar, asked Mr. Rushdie on cross-examination whether he thought the trauma of the experience might have clouded his memory. He acknowledged he had “some false memories,” including a mistaken recollection that “when I saw the attacker, I stood up to face him.”
In addition to attempted murder, Mr. Matar also faces an assault charge for a slash wound that Mr. Reese sustained. On Monday morning, Mr. Matar’s defense team told Judge David W. Foley that the lead defense lawyer, Nathaniel L. Barone II, had been hospitalized. Mr. Barone was absent again on Tuesday. In her opening statement, Ms. Schaffer asked the jury to keep an open mind about Mr. Matar’s innocence. Cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses has been relatively brief.
Prosecutors said that they expect the trial to last around two weeks.
Mr. Matar also faces federal terrorism-related charges. He is accused of offering “personnel, specifically himself, and services” to terrorists and of providing “material support and resources” to a terror group in Lebanon, according to the indictment.
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