A man injured alongside author Salman Rushdie in a knife attack on a New York lecture stage told jurors that he tried to stop the assault once he realized it wasn't a prank and was left with a gash above his eye.

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

On the witness stand, Salman Rushdie described the frenzied moments when a masked man rushed at him on a stage and repeatedly slashed him with a knife.

Author Salman Rushdie testified Tuesday in the trial of a man accused of attacking him with a knife just after he took his seat for a panel discussion at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

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.

Salman Rushdie appeared in court on Tuesday to testify in the trial of the man who is accused of trying to murder him on stage at a talk in western New York in 2022. “It occurred to me that I was dying.