Man Who Tried to Kill Salman Rushdie Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison

The man convicted of attempting to kill author Salman Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack has been sentenced to 25 years in prison. Hadi Matar, 27, from New Jersey, was given the sentence on Friday by the Chautauqua County Court nearly three months after a jury found him guilty of attempted murder in the second degree.

The verdict came after an intense trial in which Rushdie, now 77, testified in detail about the brutal attack that nearly took his life during a literary event in western New York. The novelist was stabbed 15 times, including in the head, neck, torso, and left hand, leaving him permanently blind in his right eye and suffering serious damage to his liver and intestines.

“I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in. My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying,” Rushdie said during his testimony in February.

Concurrent Sentence for Second Victim

Matar was also sentenced to seven years in prison for injuring Ralph Henry Reese, the moderator on stage with Rushdie during the attack. According to District Attorney Jason Schmidt, the sentences will run concurrently, as both victims were attacked at the same event.

“He 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,” Schmidt said. He added that Matar had “chosen” the maximum sentencing through his actions.

Attacker Shows No Remorse

Before sentencing, Matar delivered a statement to the court defending his actions. “Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people… He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that,” he said.

Despite his lack of remorse, Matar’s public defender Nathaniel Barone highlighted his client’s clean criminal record and argued that the prosecution had unfairly painted the entire audience as victims. “There was no presumption, ever, of innocence for Mr Matar from the very beginning,” Barone said.

What Motivated Hadi Matar?

Federal prosecutors revealed that Matar’s motivation for the attack stemmed from a 2006 speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who endorsed a long-standing fatwa against Rushdie for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. The book was condemned as blasphemous by Iranian clerics, sparking decades of threats against the author.

Ironically, Matar admitted in 2022 that he had only read “a couple pages” of the novel.

Rushdie’s Road to Recovery

Following the life-threatening assault, Rushdie went through an extensive recovery process and has since written a memoir titled Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which he reflects on the attack and its aftermath.

The sentence brings a legal end to a case that reignited debate around free speech, Islamism, and the threats faced by critics of the religion.