Salman Rushdie and his attacker, Hadi Matar

By Nehru Odeh

Jason Schmidt, Chautauqua County District Attorney, has opened up on why the bestselling author Salman Rushdie did not fight back when Hadi Matar stabbed him several times, inflicting severe injuries on him, which left him blind on one eye in a 2022 knife attack in New York.

Schmidt made this revelation in Matar’s ongoing trial which began on Monday, February 10 at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York. Matar, who had pleaded not guilty blurted “Free Palestine as he was being brought into the courtroom.

Schmidt said Rushdie did not fight back because he was too stunned to react after being attacked on stage.

The 77-year-old  Indian-born British-American author was left blind in one eye and severely injured after Matar attacked him moments before he was due to present a lecture in New York in 2022.

As the opening statements were delivered, Schmidt described a sudden attack, saying he bound up a small staircase and burst onto the stage as the event got underway.

Mr Schmidt said: “Without hesitation, this man holding his knife forcefully and efficiently in its speed, plunged the knife into Mr Rushdie over and over and over again.”

Matar was “stabbing, swinging, slicing into Mr Rushdie’s head, his throat, his abdomen, his thigh”, Mr Schmidt added.

“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,” the prosecutor said.

Deborah Moore Kushmaul, the chief program officer at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, who was greeting guests at Rushdie’s lecture when she heard a commotion coming from the stage recalled the bloody horror and described fearing a second attacker was going to blow up the lecture hall where the novelist was assaulted.

“I can see blood, I can see them piled on,” she said in the Chautauqua County Courthouse Monday.

“I can see.    that our audience, many of them who are elderly, were screaming. Many were rushing onto the stage,

“I knew that something terrible had happened. I didn’t know if someone died or not but I saw all the blood.”

The trial, which is expected to last 10 days, is taking place as the 36th anniversary of the fatwa – 14 February – approaches. It is believed Rushdie will testify during the trial.

It would be recalled that Rushdie previously detailed the attack – and his long recovery – in his 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder.

He recounted the near-death experience.

“Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I run? I just stood there like a pinata and let him smash me,” Rushdie wrote.

“It didn’t feel dramatic, or particularly awful. It just felt probable… matter-of-fact.

However, Rushdie explained in “Knife” that the attack has not changed his view on his most famous work.

“I am proud of the work I’ve done, and that very much includes The Satanic Verses. If anyone’s looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here,” he said.

Rushdie said that he did not want to attend the talk, and two days before the incident, he had a dream of being attacked by a gladiator with a spear in a Roman amphitheatre.

“And then I thought, ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a dream,’” he told CBS.

The Booker Prize winner had worried for his safety since his 1989 novel The Satanic Verses was labelled blasphemous by many Muslims.

The book led to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa calling for his death and Sir Salman spent years in hiding.

He has travelled freely for the past 25 years after Iran said it would not enforce the decree.

Jurors will be shown videos and photos of the attack, which ended when onlookers rushed Matar and held him until police arrived. It is unclear what Matar’s defence will be.