A prosecutor says Salman Rushdie was so stunned when a masked man started to stab him on a stage in western New York that the acclaimed author didn’t even try to fight back.

The novelist Salman Rushdie showed a jury his blinded right eye on Tuesday as he testified against the man charged with trying to murder him at a talk at a rural New York venue in 2022.

Renowned British-Indian author Salman Rushdie testified Tuesday in the trial of the man accused of attempting to kill him in 2022 in New York.

During cross-examination, the defense questioned whether Reese was certain he had been stabbed or if he could have been punched instead. Reese admitted he was unsure.

The Satanic Verses author was left blind in one eye after a 24-year-old man allegedly stormed the stage and attacked him at a literary festival in New York

Hadi Matar is charged with attempted murder in the attack, which took place in 2022 as Mr. Rushdie was about to speak at an arts conference in western New York.

It occurred to me quite clearly that I was dying,” Rushdie said on Tuesday. “That was my predominant thought.”

Salman Rushdie spoke calmly and with occasional dry humor 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.