Salman Rushdie was so stunned when a masked man started to stab him on a stage in western New York that the author didn’t even try to fight back, a prosecutor said Monday during opening statements in the suspect’s attempted murder trial.

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.

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.