Hadi Matar, the New Jersey man who repeatedly stabbed author Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, has been found guilty of attempted murder by a jury. The jury reached the verdict after deliberating for less than two hours.
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02-23, 2025Matar, 27, was also convicted of assault for injuring another man present at Rushdie's lecture during the attack. On August 12, 2022, Matar rushed onto the stage at the Chautauqua Institution as Rushdie was preparing to give a speech, stabbing him more than a dozen times in front of a live audience.
The attack left the 77-year-old award-winning novelist blind in one eye. Rushdie was a key witness during the seven-day trial, detailing the life-threatening injuries and the long and painful recovery process.
At the sentencing, Matar, sitting at the defense table, kept his head down and showed no visible reaction. As he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he quietly said "Free Palestine," echoing comments he often made while entering and exiting the trial. The judge has set his sentencing date for April 23. Matar could face a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, said that Matar was disappointed with the verdict but was well prepared. In his closing arguments on Friday, District Attorney Jason Schmidt played the jury a slow-motion video of the attack, pointing out that the attacker emerged from the audience, walked up the stairs to the stage, and then lunged at Rushdie.
Mr. Schmidt said: "I want you to see the unprovoked nature of this attack. I want you to see the targeted nature of this attack. There were a lot of people around that day, but only one person was targeted." Assistant Public Defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that the prosecution had not proven that Matar intended to kill Rushdie, which is a crucial distinction for an attempted murder conviction.
Mr. Brautigan said: "You will agree that something bad happened to Mr. Rushdie, but you don't know what Mr. Matar's conscious objective was. The testimony you heard does not establish anything beyond a chaotic, noisy outburst that injured Mr. Rushdie." Matar's lawyers previously pointed out that he carried a knife, not a gun or bomb, and noted that Rushdie's heart and lungs were not injured.
Mr. Schmidt said that while it was impossible to read Matar's mind, "it's foreseeable that if you stab someone in the face and neck 10 or 15 times, that's going to cause death." He also reminded the jury of the testimony of a trauma surgeon who said that Rushdie's injuries would have been fatal without timely treatment.
Rushdie, who was attending the event to talk about protecting writers' safety, told jurors at the trial that he thought he was dying when a masked stranger rushed onto the stage, stabbing and slashing him until he was subdued by onlookers. Rushdie suffered more than a dozen stab wounds to his head, throat, torso, thigh, and hand, and spent 17 days in a hospital in Pennsylvania and more than three weeks in a rehabilitation center in New York City, experiences he detailed in his 2024 memoir, "Knife."
In his testimony, he showed jurors his now-blind right eye, usually hidden behind a dark lens. Throughout the trial, Matar often took notes with a pen, sometimes laughing or smiling with his defense team during breaks in the testimony. His lawyers declined to call any witnesses of their own, and Matar did not testify in his own defense.
A separate federal terrorism-related charge alleges that Matar's motive for attacking Rushdie was a 2006 speech by a Hezbollah leader endorsing a decades-old fatwa, a decree calling for Rushdie's execution. Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after the publication of the novel "The Satanic Verses," which some Muslims considered blasphemous.
Rushdie lived in hiding for many years. But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he was able to travel freely for the past quarter-century. A trial on the federal terrorism-related charges will be scheduled in U.S. District Court in Buffalo.
