Opening statements are expected on Monday in the trial of the man accused of rushing onstage and stabbing the author Salman Rushdie in 2022, leaving him blind in one eye.
The man, Hadi Matar of Fairview, N.J., is charged with attempted murder and assault in the stabbing, which occurred in front of thousands of people at the Chautauqua Institution’s main amphitheater in western New York. Mr. Matar, who was 24 years old at the time of the attack, has pleaded not guilty.
A jury was chosen last week in the trial, which will take place at the Chautauqua County Courthouse in Mayville, N.Y., about an hour south of Buffalo.
Jason Schmidt, the district attorney, plans to call 15 witnesses to testify against Mr. Matar, who faces up to 32 years in prison if convicted on both counts, according to court records.
Mr. Rushdie, 77, was about to give a talk on exiled writers when he was attacked. He had spent much of his life hiding from the Iranian government and Islamic extremists after the release of his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses.”
He is expected to testify during the trial, prosecutors said in October.
Mr. Matar also faces federal terrorism-related charges in Buffalo. He is accused of offering “personnel, specifically himself, and services” to terrorists and of providing “material support and resources” to Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, where he grew up, according to the indictment.
A judge postponed the state trial in January 2024 so that Mr. Matar’s public defender could obtain parts of a manuscript from Mr. Rushdie’s book “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” in which Mr. Rushdie gives an account of the stabbing. It was published in April.
In the book, Mr. Rushdie describes a deep knife wound in his left hand, two more in his neck and another on his face.
“And there was the knife in the eye,” he wrote. “That was the cruelest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there would be no possibility of saving the vision. It was gone.”
The trial was rescheduled at least two more times, including once when the public defender, Nathaniel Barone, filed a motion to move it out of Chautauqua County, according to court records. Mr. Barone argued that it was impossible for his client to get a fair trial in an area where the case was well known.
The Appellate Division of New York denied that request in October, and a new trial date was set for February, according to Madeline H. Contiguglia, a spokeswoman for the Chautauqua County district attorney.
Mr. Rushdie, a British novelist who was born in India to a Muslim family, has written 25 books and won the Booker Prize for “Midnight’s Children.” He drew worldwide attention after publishing “The Satanic Verses,” a partly fictional account of the Prophet Muhammad that some Muslims considered blasphemous. In 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, that called on Muslims to kill Mr. Rushdie.
Mr. Rushdie, who lived in London at the time, moved into a fortified safe house under the protection of the British police for the next decade.
But in the years leading up to the attack, Mr. Rushdie resumed his public life. He has lived in the United States for the past 20 years and became an American citizen, and he was often seen around New York City and other parts of the country without any evident security.
Mr. Matar became more isolated and fixated on Islam after a 2018 trip to the Middle East, his mother, Silvana Fardos, said.
In August 2022, Mr. Matar took a bus to Chautauqua and bought a ticket to attend Mr. Rushdie’s talk. Shortly after the author took the stage and sat down, Mr. Matar ran up to Mr. Rushdie and stabbed him roughly 10 times, according to officials and video of the attack. Bystanders raced to Mr. Rushdie’s side and pulled the assailant away.