The man charged with stabbing Sir Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, is allowed to seek material related to Sir Salman’s forthcoming memoir about the attack before standing trial, a judge ruled on Wednesday.
Jury selection in the trial of Hadi Matar for attempted murder and assault was originally scheduled to start on January 8.
It is now on hold, since Matar’s lawyer argued on Tuesday that the defendant is entitled by law to see the manuscript, due out in April 2024, and related material, before standing trial.
Written or recorded statements about the attack made by any witness are considered potential evidence, lawyers said.
“It will not change the ultimate outcome,” Chautauqua County district attorney Jason Schmidt said of the postponement. A new date has not yet been set.
Matar, 26, who lived in Fairview, New Jersey, in the US, has been held without bail since prosecutors said he stabbed Sir Salman more than a dozen times after rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institution where the author was about to speak in August 2022.
Sir Salman, 75, was blinded in his right eye and his left hand was damaged in the attack. He announced in October 2023 that he had written about the attack in a forthcoming memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
With trial preparations under way at the time, the prosecutor said he requested a copy of the manuscript as part of the legal discovery process.
The request, he said, was declined by Sir Salman’s representatives, who cited intellectual property rights.
Defence lawyer Nathaniel Barone is expected to issue a writ demanding the material.
The prosecution on Tuesday downplayed the book’s significance to the trial, noting the attack was witnessed, and in some cases recorded, by a large, live audience.
On stage with Sir Salman at the western New York venue was Henry Reese, 73, the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, who suffered a gash to his forehead.
Sir Salman, who could give evidence at the trial, spent years in hiding after the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 edict, a fatwa, calling for his death after publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Over the past two decades, Sir Salman has travelled freely.
A motive for the 2022 attack has not been disclosed. Matar, in an interview from prison with The New York Post after his arrest, praised Khomeini and said Sir Salman “attacked Islam”.
