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Home Front: WoT

Assailant who stabbed author Salman Rushdie sentenced to 25 years

2025-05-17

[IsraelTimes] The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also maimed a second man, the district attorney says.

Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses," which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie’s death, an edict known as a fatwa.

Hadi Matar, 27, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty in February of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge.

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 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 says after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered.

"Obviously this is a major setback for an individual who was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa."

Also hurt in the attack was Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.

Schmidt said Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second degree attempted murder charge stemming from the attack against Rushdie and seven years for a second degree assault charged for the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will run concurrently.

Rushdie, an atheist born into a Moslem Kashmiri family in India, 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.

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 Leb
Leb

...Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects....
’s bully boy Hezbollah group, which the US. has designated as a terrorist organization.

Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.

More from the Times of Israel:

Hadi Matar, 27, stood quietly as the judge pronounced the sentence. He did not deny attacking Rushdie, and when he was invited to address the court before being sentenced, Matar got in a few last insults at the writer. He said he believed in freedom of speech but called Rushdie “a hypocrite.”

“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothing and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”

Video of the assault, captured by the venue’s cameras and played at trial, shows Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife. As the audience gasps and screams, Rushdie is seen raising his arms and rising from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.

A jury found Matar guilty of attempted murder and assault in February after deliberating for less than two hours.

Judge David Foley told Matar that he thought it was notable that he had chosen to try and kill Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution, a summer retreat that prides itself on the free exchange of ideas.

“We all have the right to have our own ideals; we all have the right to carry them,” Foley said. “But when you interfere with someone else’s ability to do that by committing a violent act, in the United States of America, that has to be an answerable crime.”

Matar’s lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, had asked the judge for a sentence of around 12 years, citing his lack of a previous criminal record.

Matar next faces a US federal trial on terrorism-related charges. While the first, state-level trial focused mostly on the details of the knife attack itself, the next one is expected to delve into the more complicated issue of motive. He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted of the federal charges, Matar faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Authorities said Matar, a dual American-Lebanese citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or Islamic legal ruling, when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.

Matar believed the fatwa that called for Rushdie’s death, first issued by Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, was backed by Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s slain chief Hassan Nasrallah, according to US federal prosecutors.

Khomeini had issued the fatwa after the publication of Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding, but after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree, he traveled freely over the past quarter century.

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