Prosecutor says Salman Rushdie was too stunned to react when a man started to stab him

MAYVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — Salman Rushdie was so stunned when a masked man started to stab him on a stage in western New York that the author didn’t even try to fight back, a prosecutor said Monday during opening statements in the suspect’s attempted murder trial.

Rushdie, 77, is expected to testify during the trial of Hadi Matar, bringing the two face-to-face for the first time since the attack that left Rushdie seriously wounded and blind in one eye.

On the day of the attack in August 2022, the Booker Prize-winning novelist was seated in an armchair on stage at the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheater, about to present a lecture on keeping writers safe.

District Attorney Jason Schmidt told jurors Monday that the attack was swift and sudden. He said Matar bounded up a staircase to the stage and ran about 30 feet (9 meters) toward Rushdie. As the stabbing began, Rushdie and fellow speaker Henry Reese were so stunned that they initially remained seated.

“Without hesitation this man holding his knife … forcefully and efficiently in its speed, plunged the knife into Mr. Rushdie over and over and over and over again,” Schmidt said, “stabbing, swinging, slicing into Mr. Rushdie’s head, his throat, his abdomen, his thigh” and a hand the author raised to protect himself.

“It all happened so fast that even the person under attack, Mr. Rushdie, and the person sitting next to him, Mr. Reese, didn’t register what was happening,” Schmidt said.

Rushdie eventually got up and ran away with Matar in pursuit and other people subdued the attacker, Schmidt said. Reese, co-founder of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, suffered a gash above his eye.

A Chautauqua Institution employee testified that he rushed from backstage to intervene when he saw a man was on stage violently swinging his arms at Rushdie.

“I ran as fast as I could, lowered my shoulder and got as much of him with as much of me as a I could to disrupt what was happening,” said Jordan Steves, who was the media relations coordinator.

Steves, one of two witnesses to testify Monday, identified Matar as the assailant.

Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, is charged with attempted murder and assault. He has pleaded not guilty. He calmly said “Free Palestine” as he was led into the court Monday. During Schmidt’s opening statement, Matar looked on from the defense table, occasionally taking notes, and smiling and laughing while speaking with his attorneys.

“This is not a case of mistaken identity,” Schmidt said. “Mr. Matar is the person who attacked Mr. Rushdie without provocation.”

Rushdie, an Indian-born British-American author, detailed the attack and his long, painful recovery in a memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” released last year.

Rushdie had worried for his safety since his 1989 novel “The Satanic Verses” was denounced as blasphemous by many Muslims and led to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa calling for his death. Rushdie spent years in hiding, but had traveled freely over the past quarter century after Iran announced it would not enforce the edict.

The trial is taking place as the 36th anniversary of the fatwa — Feb. 14, 1989 — approaches.

Matar’s defense faced a challenging start after his public defender, Nathaniel Barone, was hospitalized with an undisclosed illness preventing him from attending the start of the trial. Judge David Foley refused a defense request to postpone opening statements and instructed Barone’s associate to speak in his place.

Assistant public defender Lynn Schaffer told jurors that prosecutors couldn’t prove Matar’s guilt, even with videos and photos. She said the case is not as straightforward as the prosecution portrayed.

“The elements of the crime are more than `something really bad happened’ — they’re more defined,” Shaffer said. “Something bad did happen, something very bad did happen, but the district attorney has to prove much more than that.”

She acknowledged that nearly all the jurors admitted during jury selection that they had heard something about the case.

“No matter what you knew coming in here, none of that information ever told you why and none of that information that you get from the district attorney is going to tell you why,” she said.

The trial will last up to two weeks, the lawyers said.

The trial’s first witness was a Chautauqua Institution administrator who said she was handed the knife by an institution reverend after she rushed toward the stage.

Deborah Moore Kushmaul said she immediately gave it to a law enforcement officer.

Matar told investigators he traveled by bus to Chautauqua, about 75 miles (120 kilometers) south of Buffalo. He is believed to have slept in the grounds of the arts and academic retreat the night before the attack.

In a separate indictment, federal authorities allege Matar was motivated by a terrorist organization’s endorsement of the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. A later trial on the federal charges — terrorism transcending national boundaries, providing material support to terrorists and attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization — will be scheduled in U.S. District Court in Buffalo.

In the federal indictment, authorities allege Matar believed the edict was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s then-leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

Rushdie has been one of the world’s most celebrated authors since the 1981 publication of “Midnight’s Children,” winner of the Booker Prize. His other works include the novels “Shame” and “Victory City,” which he completed shortly before the 2022 stabbing, and the 2012 memoir “Joseph Anton,” in which he wrote about his time in hiding.

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Associated Press national writer Hillel Italie contributed.