The man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie, leaving him blind in one eye, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, the maximum term possible in the case.
Friday’s sentencing hearing was the culmination of a relatively swift trial that began on February 4.
There was little ambiguity about the central events underlying the case: In August 2022, a 24-year-old named Hadi Matar rushed the stage of an amphitheatre where Rushdie was delivering a public lecture for New York’s Chautauqua Institution.
Matar stabbed Rushdie approximately 15 times, delivering cuts to his neck, body and head. After being airlifted to a hospital, Rushdie eventually lost sight in one eye. Another speaker — Henry Reese, who runs a nonprofit for writers in exile — also received injuries, including a stab wound.
Rushdie, now 77, testified in the state-level trial against Matar. “He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing,” the novelist said.
He added that he thought at first he was being struck by fists, not a knife. It was only later that he realised the severity of his situation: “I saw a large quantity of blood pouring onto my clothes.”
The injuries resulted in Rushdie undergoing painful surgeries, including to seal his blinded eye. He spent months in recovery. “I’m not as energetic as I used to be. I’m not as physically strong as I used to be,” he told the court.
On February 21, after less than two hours of deliberation, a jury in western New York found Matar both guilty of attempted murder for his attack on Rushdie and of assault for the injuries to Reese.
In Friday’s hearing, Matar received 25 years for the attempted murder sentence and seven for the assault on Reese, to be served at the same time since the attacks happened at the same time.
Rushdie, a British American novelist, was born in India to a Muslim family. His books have won wide acclaim: His novel Midnight’s Children earned the Booker Prize, a top literary honour awarded each year to a work of English-language fiction.
But it was his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988 that stirred up lasting controversy, specifically for passages deemed blasphemous to Muslims. By 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.
The announcement sent Rushdie into hiding, and the British government assigned him round-the-clock protection. Deadly protests accompanied the novel’s publication, and bookstores, along with those close to Rushdie, faced violent attacks.
Before Friday’s sentencing, Matar also delivered a statement to the court voicing his opposition to Rushdie and his work.
“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”
Later, outside the courtroom, defence lawyer Nathaniel Barone took questions about whether his client felt regret or remorse about his actions.
“ I think that’s a fair question, and I can’t answer that,” he responded. “All I can tell you is that I think that, unfortunately, people make bad decisions, and it’s something that certainly they regret or they’re remorseful about, but they may have a difficult time expressing that for whatever reasons.”
Barone added that he felt Matar would have acted differently in hindsight. “ I know, if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he is sitting today. And if he could change things, he would.”
Matar’s defence team had sought a lesser sentence of 12 years in prison and plans to appeal the verdict, arguing that the prosecution did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt an intent to kill Rushdie.
Barone also questioned the intense level of scrutiny on the case, calling it a “publicity sponge”. He argued that his client was denied the presumption of innocence due to any suspect.
The prosecution, however, praised the sentencing hearing’s outcome as justice for the pain Rushdie continues to endure.
“He’s traumatised. He has nightmares about what he experienced,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the hearing.
“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.”
In explaining to the judge why he was pushing for the maximum sentence, Schmidt said that Matar “designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr. Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it”.
Separately, Matar, now 27, faces three counts of federal terrorism-related charges in the US, including providing material support to terrorists and committing terrorism that transcends national boundaries.
“We allege that, in attempting to murder Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022, Hadi Matar committed an act of terrorism in the name of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization aligned with the Iranian regime,” former US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. Iran, however, has denied involvement in Matar’s attack on Rushdie.
Rushdie, meanwhile, has channelled his experiences from the attack into a memoir called Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
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