An American-Lebanese man was found guilty by a jury Friday of attempting to kill novelist Salman Rushdie when storming a stage and repeatedly plunging a knife into the “Satanic Verses” author.
Hadi Matar now faces up to 25 years in prison, and will be sentenced on April 23, a court official said in a statement confirming the conviction on attempted murder and assault charges.
Matar’s legal team had sought to prevent witnesses from characterizing Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran’s 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in “The Satanic Verses.”
Rushdie had told jurors at the trial that Matar “was stabbing and slashing” at him during the event in August 2022 at an upscale cultural center in rural New York.
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie said, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood.”
He said it “occurred to me I was dying” before he was helicoptered to a trauma hospital.
Jurors heard closing arguments from both prosecutors and defense lawyers before retiring to consider their verdict Friday.
Matar was rapidly found guilty of stabbing Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade that was shown to witnesses and the court.
He repeatedly used the trial to grandstand, shouting pro-Palestinian slogans on several occasions.
Matar previously told media he had only read two pages of “The Satanic Verses” but believed the author had “attacked Islam.”
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.
He became the center of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable in any circumstances.
Last year, he published a memoir called “Knife” in which he recounted the near-death experience.
The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye was severed, and he told the court that “it was decided the eye would be stitched shut to allow it to moisturize. It was quite a painful operation — which I don’t recommend.”
Asked to describe the intensity of the pain over the attack, he said it was “a 10” out of 10.
His Adam’s apple was also partially lacerated, and his liver and small bowel penetrated.
“The first thing I said on regaining the ability of speech was ‘I can speak’,” he said to stifled laughter from jurors.
“How do you squeeze toothpaste onto a toothbrush with only one hand?” he explained when asked about injuries to his hand received as he tried to defend himself.
