- Saturday, May 17, 2025
Hadi Matar stabbed Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade. It blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery
By: India Weekly
THE AMERICAN-LEBANESE man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie during an event at a New York cultural center in 2022 was on Friday (16) sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Hadi Matar, 27, was convicted in February of attempted murder and assault for the stabbing, which left Rushdie blind in one eye.
Matar, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, received the maximum sentence of 25 years in Chautauqua County Court for the attack on Rushdie and seven years for assault on Henry Reese, the moderator of the event, who was also injured.
Matar also faces separate federal terrorism charges that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Judge David Foley ordered the sentences to run concurrently. The British-American author did not attend the sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement.
Rushdie, 77, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.”
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, had denounced the novel as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie’s death.
A video that captured the assault shows Matar rushing the Chautauqua Institution’s stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm.
Some portions of the video was shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony.
“He’s traumatized. He has nightmares about what he experienced,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered.
“Obviously this is a major setback for an individual that was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa.”
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie told jurors, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood.”
Matar – who shouted pro-Palestinian slogans on several occasions during the trial – stabbed Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade.
He previously told the media he had only read two pages of Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” but believed the author had “attacked Islam.”
Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers, was also injured in the attack. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.
Rushdie was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso, and left hand.
The attack blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.
The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye was severed in the attack.
His Adam’s apple was lacerated, his liver and small bowel penetrated, and he became paralyzed in one hand after suffering severe nerve damage to his arm.
Rushdie was rescued from Matar by bystanders.
Last year, he published a memoir called “Knife” in which he recounted the near-death experience.
His publisher announced in March that “The Eleventh Hour,” a collection of short stories examining themes and places of interest to Rushdie, will be released on November 4, 2025.
Rushdie was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel “Midnight’s Children” (1981), which won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.
But “The Satanic Verses” brought him far greater, mostly unwelcome, attention.
Rushdie became the center of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable under any circumstance.
Books and bookshops were torched, his Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher was shot several times.
Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for a decade after the 1989 fatwa, but for the past 20 years – until the attack – he lived relatively normally in New York.
Matar did not testify at his trial. His defense lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault.
Matar’s attorney Nathaniel Barone said his client will file an appeal.
“I know if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he’s sitting today. And if he could change things, he would,” Barone said.
Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism.
Prosecutors accuse him of providing material support to Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah group, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.
Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo. (Agencies)
