The Free Press
MAYVILLE, New York — Two and a half years after nearly losing his life outside this remote lakeside town, Salman Rushdie squared off against his accused assailant in a snowbound courthouse Tuesday morning.
In meticulous detail, the Booker Prize–winning author testified about the maniacal knife assault he endured while onstage at an arts festival on August 12, 2022. The attack—and he was stabbed 15 times before Good Samaritans in the audience subdued his assailant—left Rushdie’s then–75-year-old body punctured from his throat to his liver.
“It occurred to me, quite clearly, that I was dying,” the British American novelist methodically told the 16-person jury made up of rural New Yorkers. His alleged attacker, Lebanese American boxing enthusiast Hadi Matar, 27, sat impassively across from him, clad in a baggy, light blue dress shirt and oversized trousers. “And that was my predominant thought,” Rushdie added.
The stabbing cost Rushdie partial use of his left hand, along with his right eye. He wears a special pair of glasses, with a darkened lens covering the missing eye. At a dramatic high point of his testimony, Rushdie removed the spectacles to show the jury members exactly “what’s left.”
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming,” the Indian-born writer said. “A lake of blood, that was clearly my own blood. . . was spreading outwards.”
The attack at the Chautauqua Institution, a cultural and artistic forum a few miles from Lake Erie and the Canadian border, nearly accomplished the objective the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies have tried to achieve for decades: to murder Rushdie as punishment for his depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses.
In 1989, Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for Rushdie’s death. Khomeini’s followers have since attacked and murdered publishers and translators of The Satanic Verses, in operations launched from Japan to Turkey.
Rushdie went into hiding in Europe and maintained a permanent security detail. He eventually relocated to New York in 2000 and was living relatively openly at the time of the Chautauqua assault. (In 2017, he appeared on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, engaging in some gallows humor about life under a fatwa.) Many in American law enforcement doubted Iran and its proxies would dare attack him inside the U.S.
New York State has charged Matar with attempted murder in the second degree of Rushdie as well as assault of Henry Reese, who was appearing with Rushdie on stage at the Chautauqua event in 2023. If convicted, Matar faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, though a related terrorism charge could potentially give him life.
The question hanging over this case, from the moment Rushdie was rushed off the stage, is whether Matar was acting on orders from Iran or its Middle Eastern proxies, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia.
As a journalist who’s been reporting about Iran and the Rushdie story—off and on—since the mid-2010s, and during trips to Tehran and Beirut, I’ve learned a bit about Matar from the trial, but only a bit.
Rushdie’s alleged would-be assassin fascinates me, but he reveals little of himself through body language; he spends the proceedings sitting stoically at the defense table, occasionally taking notes on a yellow legal pad or appearing to nod off.
The exceptions—and they were significant—came as he entered court each day.
“Free Palestine. Free Palestine,” he told a phalanx of reporters in a soft voice as he came in on Monday. On Tuesday, the slogan was: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Were these the words of a disillusioned “lone wolf,” as Matar has been described in the media, who was perhaps bent on making a name for himself by carrying out the Iranian leadership’s fatwa at long last? Or was he a terrorist, acting under Iranian command and control or at the behest of its regional proxy militias?
These are the unknowns that have haunted me since the attack—and to which answers still remain frustratingly elusive.
We do know some things for certain. Matar is a U.S. citizen, born in California to Lebanese immigrants who divorced when he was a child. He then moved to New Jersey with his mother while his father returned to his hometown of Yaroun, Lebanon, in an area near the Israel border controlled by Hezbollah.
Court records and press reports portray Matar as a disgruntled youth who hated school, worked at a discount store, and failed at becoming a professional boxer. He studied Islamic teachings by following online scholars.
U.S. officials have told The Free Press that the Iranian government, at the very least, appeared to incite Matar’s actions. While Tehran denied being behind Matar’s attack, circumstantial evidence points to a role for Tehran: The State Department sanctioned an Iranian organization, the 15 Khordad Foundation, shortly after the attack for repeatedly offering a payment to anyone who’d murder Rushdie. The bounty’s grown to $3.3 million, though no link to Matar was alleged.
A separate Iranian foundation close to the government has praised the attempted murder and promised Matar a thousand square meters of agricultural farmland in the country as a reward.
U.S. and Arab officials tracking the Matar case told The Free Press that U.S. and Lebanese agencies are investigating Matar’s past travels to southern Lebanon; they are searching for a firm link between Rushdie’s assailant and Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah’s leaders and operatives. Matar, in a separate charge, has been accused of providing material support to Hezbollah.
In 2018, a teenage Matar visited his father in Yaroun. U.S. and Arab officials as well as nongovernmental Middle East experts told The Free Press Hezbollah runs training camps and scout programs in southern Lebanese towns, among them Yaroun. The program includes religious and military instruction by organizations like the Imam al-Mahdi Scouts.
At the time of his arrest, Matar was carrying a fake New Jersey driver’s license in the name of Imad Mugniyah. This cannot have been a random choice: Mugniyah was for decades Hezbollah’s top military commander and terrorism planner. He was assassinated in Syria in 2008, reportedly in a joint operation carried out by the CIA and Israel’s spy service, Mossad.
Matar’s mother, Silvana Fardos, told The New York Times after the Rushdie attack that her son had come back from Lebanon totally changed—a follower of Khomeini’s teachings and of Hezbollah. “I’m done with him,” she said after learning of the assault on Rushdie.
These all suggest Iranian- or Hezbollah-backed terrorism—but don’t quite prove it. “It’s very likely Hezbollah established its ties to Matar when he was in south Lebanon,” a senior Lebanese official tracking the case told The Free Press. “What’s unclear is if he was formally operating under Hezbollah’s orders.”
The evidence of attempted murder against Matar is overwhelming, and includes not only Rushdie’s riveting words but video camera recordings, police surveillance footage, and multiple other eyewitness accounts.
On Monday, Jordan Steves, a Chautauqua Institution staffer, directly pointed to Matar as the man he tackled in an effort to stop the assault on Rushdie. “I ran as fast as I could, lowered my shoulder, and got as much of him as possible to try and disrupt what was happening,” he recounted. Today, a Chautauqua County deputy sheriff, Jason Beichner, recounted filming most of the attack and aftermath with his body camera.
In the audience, Rushdie’s wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, sat alongside his longtime literary agent, Andrew Wylie.
And whatever the outcome in the New York state case, Matar is still facing federal prosecution. The Department of Justice issued a terse five-page indictment in July. It alleges that Matar “attempted to provide material support and resources to Hizballah” during a two-year period—September 2020 through August 2022—but doesn’t name specific actions Matar allegedly took beyond the attack on Rushdie. This could be part of the ongoing FBI probe.
The indictment alleges Matar was motivated to strike Rushdie by a 2006 speech given by the late Hezbollah commander and spiritual leader Hassan Nasrallah, in which he formally endorsed Khomeini’s fatwa against the writer. The Justice Department didn’t say if Matar was schooled on Nasrallah’s speech while in Lebanon or simply encountered it online.
The Department of Justice sought a plea agreement with Matar over the past year, in an effort to avoid a trial. Prosecutors sought his admission to both the attempted murder and terrorism charges in return for a lesser sentence. Part of the reason, officials told The Free Press, was their fear that Matar could use his court appearances to praise Iran’s leadership—something that’s still possible.
Meanwhile, Matar’s attempted murder trial is expected to last two weeks in this incongruously quiet, pastoral—and frigid—lakeside setting. It is almost as unlikely a setting for such a trial as the Chautauqua Institution was for the attack itself.
And yet in another sense, Chautauqua was the perfect spot for an assassin to reach Rushdie.
Known for light security—a reflection, in part, of its Methodist founders’ pacifism—the place was all too easy for Matar to scout in advance. Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt told me in a series of interviews over the past 18 months that Rushdie’s alleged assailant seemed to have done significant research and planning.
(In recent months, Chautauqua’s reputation for religious tolerance has taken a hit, as Jewish members have bristled at the appointment of a senior staff member who they say failed to condemn the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel committed by another Iranian proxy, Hamas.)
Matar acquired an official pass to the open-air amphitheater where Rushdie was announced as a speaker eight months in advance. Wearing a Covid mask and military-style fatigues, he was armed with a bevy of blades in a black backpack when he charged at Rushdie and began stabbing him.
Schmidt has so far kept the trial tightly focused on the only thing he has to prove, which is not why Matar tried to kill Rushdie, but that he did.
His witnesses, including a police officer and Chautauqua Institution staff, have identified Matar as the man who conducted the assault and was, subsequently, restrained and arrested on the stage where Rushdie appeared.
Rushdie, too, seemed to resist any temptation to read the mind of the man who tried to kill him. Obviously, he has thought about what motivated Matar—deeply.
Last year, he published a memoir in which he holds an imaginary interview with Matar, quizzing the erstwhile New Jersey resident on his childhood, religious teachings, escape plan, and travels to the Middle East.
Rushdie writes of interrogating Matar as well about his travels to south Lebanon, Hezbollah’s stronghold. “So it seems you did change,” Rushdie writes in Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. “Something happened to you there that altered your whole personality.”
Yet on Tuesday, Rushdie barely looked in the defendant’s direction and spoke of him almost as if describing a being from a nightmare. “I was very struck by his eyes, which were dark and seemed very ferocious to me,” Rushdie said of his attacker, who was 24 years old at the time.
Judge David Foley, ruling that this description would be too prejudicial to Matar, ordered the jury to disregard it and struck it from the trial record.
But everyone in the courtroom heard it. And I doubt any of us will forget it.
Click below to listen to Bari talk about the belief that “words are violence” just days after Salman Rushdie was stabbed on a stage in Western New York.