The novelist Salman Rushdie showed a jury his right eye blinded on Tuesday when he testified against the man accused of trying to kill him during a talk in the rural area of New York in 2022.
Hadi Mata, 26, declared himself innocent of the positions of attempted second degree murder and second degree assault presented by the district prosecutor of the County of Chautauqua.
Rushdie entered the courtroom dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and gray tie.
The right lens of his glasses darkened, masking the eye, that the knife of his attacker had crossed the optic nerve.
“I was aware of this person running to me from my right side,” Rushdie testified in the court in Mayville, a few miles north of the Chautauqua institution, the site of his attack on August 12, 2022.
“It hit me very strong,” Rushdie said. “Initially, I thought I had hit me. I thought I was hitting with his fist. But very shortly after I saw a large amount of blood that spilled on my clothes, and by that moment I was hitting me repeatedly. Stabbing, cut “.
Killing, dressed in a baggy shirt, sat with his nearby defense lawyers. In his memoirs about the attack, Rushdie imagined questioning to kill about the attack and wrote that he was eager to face him in a court room.
Rushdie, who spent most of the 1990s hidden in the United Kingdom after receiving death threats for his 1988 novel “The satanic verses”, was stabbed about 15 times: in the head, neck, torso and torso and The left hand, blinding his right and harmful eye his liver and intestines. The trauma doctors who treated him after he was transferred by plane to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, said he lost so much blood that he approached death.
Rushdie said the stabbing in his right eye was the most dangerous.
“You can see that this is what remains,” said Rushdie, removing his glasses and resorting to the jury.
“There is no vision in the eye at all.”
The assault position is for the wound of Henry Reese, the co -founder of the city of Asylum of Pittsburgh, a non -profit group that helps exile writers, who were making the talk with Rushdie that morning. Reese is also due to testify.
Rushdie described his attacker as dressed in very dark clothes with a dark and dark face mask.
“I was very beaten by their eyes that were dark and they seemed very fierce,” Rushdie testified.
A defense lawyer of Mata opposed the characterization, and Judge David Foley hit the response of the same record.
“It’s fine, not fierce,” Rushdie said.
The district prosecutor of Chautauqua, Jason Schmidt, reformulated his question, asking the writer how he got to conclusions about the ferocity of his attacker.
“It caught my attention several times, sometimes half a dozen,” Rushdie replied.
“At some point, I thought I was dying. That was my immediate thought. “
