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 wounded a second man, the district attorney said.
Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iranโs supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdieโs death, an edict known as a fatwa.
Hadi Matar, 27, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, in February. 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 Institutionโs 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.
โHeโs traumatised. He has nightmares about what he experienced,โ Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered.
โObviously 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.โ
