Salman Rushdie spoke calmly and with occasional dry humour as he testified on Tuesday against the man accused of trying to murder him, the first time the two have been in the same place since the 2022 knife attack on the novelist onstage at a New York arts institute.
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Hadi Matar, 26, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault.
Rushdie, 77, walked into the courtroom dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and grey tie.
Two sheriff’s deputies stood at alert by Matar, seated at a table with his team of public defenders.
The right lens of Rushdie’s spectacles was blacked out, masking the eye, which his attacker’s knife had pierced through to the optic nerve.
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“I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right hand side,” Rushdie testified in a courtroom in Mayville, a few kilometres north of the Chautauqua Institution, the lakeside rural arts haven where he was attacked on August 12, 2022.