Salman Rushdie, our investigation into his assassination attempt

Every time I saw him, he was surrounded by two or three pretty girls, “said Graydon Carter in 2012. The former boss of “Vanity Fair” owns a restaurant in the West Village, the Waverly Inn, where the bans and the backbans of the New York intelligentsia throng. Salman Rushdie is, he tells us, “one of [ses] best customers”: “He was still dining with us less than two weeks before this horrible attack” which could have been fatal to him.

Read also Isabelle Adjani’s tribute to the courage of the writer: “Salman Rushdie survived and with him, the faculty of our thought”

Obviously, the author of the “Satanic Verses” is a pleasure seeker who led a life at odds with the precepts advocated by the Iranian ayatollahs, authors of the fatwa launched against him in 1989. In July, he had offered himself a vacation in Arezzo, Italy. On August 12, he was about to spend an idyllic day in Chautauqua, a small lakeside village in western New York State. In this “utopian and timeless” place, according to a regular, a venerable cultural community, the Chautauqua Institution, had invited him to talk about a subject that is dear to him: America, this safe exile for authors and artists. persecuted…

Read also: Olivier Orban: “Salman Rushdie does not want to be a cursed writer”

Salman Rushdie took refuge in the United States in 2000, fleeing London where he lived under heavy police protection, in an apartment with armored windows. He was then in love with Padma Lakshmi, an Indian beauty much younger than him: she was 30, he was 53, and he was not yet divorced from his third wife, publisher Elizabeth West. He had met Padma a year earlier, at a party, and had asked her for her phone number. She said she fell instantly under the spell of the cursed writer. “Humor is his fatal weapon”, explained Padma Lakshmi in his Memoirs, “Love, Loss, and What We Ate”, published in 2016. He moved in with her in an apartment near Union Square, a trendy district from lower Manhattan, and married her in 2004. The couple then became one of the most glamorous in the city. A political refugee, illustrious author of bestsellers, and an ex-top model: it’s hard to do better to shine in New York circles!

Rushdie is happy: he can take the subway without police protection. He is present at all openings, all social events that matter. The “New York Times”, which devotes a portrait to him, sees him one evening in full conversation with the fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg at the opening of the artist Ouattara Watts, then at the Junoon, a fashionable restaurant where he is the guest of honour, celebrated by a hundred people, including Courtney Love who poses, all smiles, her head on his shoulder… Salman Rushdie is also a hot topic in celebrity magazines. Her marriage to Padma Lakshmi collapsed in 2007. She will say that their sex life was no longer on top. He wanted too much and she, ill, could no longer satisfy him, she says without resentment, because she insists: “My meeting with Salman is one of the most beautiful things that have happened to me. »

Since a trip to Lebanon in 2018, Hadi Matar no longer spoke to his mother and reproached her for her “too Western” attitude

His reputation as a ladies’ man is not accidental. At the end of 2011, he was even the subject of a fatwa of a new kind, but now very fashionable, launched by Devorah Rose, “socialite” (trendy socialite) who made appearances on the reality TV show ” The Real Housewives of New York City”. Believing that he humiliated her, furious that she rejected his advances, she reveals online the intimate text messages that he would have sent her. “He has the emotional intelligence of a horny teenager,” she accuses. When I’m with him, I feel like I’m next to a 5-year-old genius.”

Salman Rushdie, for his part, denies having tried anything and says he is “mortified” to see his name associated with his. It doesn’t matter, and he knows it. On the contrary, New York loves this kind of story. He feels free and knows that in the capital of “no judgment” no one will condemn him. In love with his hard-won freedom of expression, he is passionate about social networks and has 1.2 million followers on Twitter, where he quotes Popeye’s “immortal words”: “I am who I am and that is all that I am. »

Humor, always: in 2017, in an episode of the hit soap opera “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (“Larry and his navel”), he reassures actor Larry David, supposed to be himself the subject of a fatwa . “The advantage of this situation, he explains to her, is that you no longer need excuses to decline a dinner! And you will take advantage of the “fatwa sex”: women love danger, they will all fall for you. Nice snub to his enemies! “If we can laugh at these things today, he would comment later, why deprive ourselves? »

At the time, the Iranian mullahs calmed down, at least on the surface. Salman Rushdie feels completely safe. He wants to lead as normal an existence as possible, no longer be a cursed writer in exile. He took American nationality to participate in the elections, because he regrets not having been able to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. In his last interview, given to the German magazine “Stern” fifteen days before the attack, Salman Rushdie says he is more worried about America and democracy than his own fate. “I tried to get him to talk about him and his life with the fatwa,” says Raphael Geiger, the newspaper’s correspondent. But what really interested him was the situation in America, the weapons, Trump, whom he said he had met in New York several times, and Marine Le Pen, who won more than 40% of the vote in France… He was very relaxed and gave me two hours, he had plenty of time. He came alone, in a good mood, without a bodyguard or press secretary. He seemed very at peace with himself, relishing the fact that his life was finally back to normal. »

Eternal optimist, Salman Rushdie did not imagine for a second, last Friday, that a madman of God was going to try to carry out the sentence pronounced against him by Khomeini in 1989. The organizers of the event did not think of it either, who had provided neither metal detector nor special security measures to receive the author of the “Satanic Verses”. Before the start of the conference, the participants read an announcement on the big screen prohibiting food and drink in the room, but not weapons, which would obviously have had a bad effect in a demonstration placed under the sign of freedom of expression, and open to all walks of life.

In the audience, no one is alarmed by the presence of a skinny young man, about 1.80 meters tall, dressed in black. He has the Middle Eastern type, we take him for a Rushdie admirer. But it’s the opposite: Hadi Matar came to kill him. According to the investigators, he has, as often, the profile of the “lone wolf”, desocialized and idle. Matar was born in the United States 24 years ago to Lebanese parents from Yaroun, a region controlled by Hezbollah. Until the attack, he lived with his mother, Silvana Fardos, in Fairview, a neat and middle-class suburb of New Jersey, very close to New York. There was really nothing missing: the house was large (more than 200 square meters), pretty, with four bedrooms and a garden. His mother, an Arabic teaching assistant and translator at a college, moved there in 2018, after divorcing. Leaving California, where she had lived with her husband, she had joined New Jersey as one makes a new start, had fallen under the spell of this house rented for more than 3,000 dollars a month and had settled there with several members. of his family, including his mother and twin daughters aged about 14.

Theresa, the neighbor opposite, who has lived in the neighborhood for two decades and helps everyone, considers her a “good person”: “I was going to clean his garden, he tells us. -she. The grandmother gave me bread that she baked herself. I have never seen anyone wearing the veil and I have never seen anything radical about them. On the other hand, Hadi was silent. I saw him for the last time two or three days before the attack. As usual, he just said hello to me. You could tell he was lonely. »

According to the confidences of his mother to the English press, the young man would have been radicalized in 2018, during a month-long trip to Lebanon which would have “gone badly” and where he would have felt “very alone”. Since then, he lived in the basement of the house and cooked his own meals.

Rushdie said he was more worried about America than his fate

Last April, he had taken out a subscription in a boxing gym, which delighted her, before terminating it recently. The mother was worried about this son who had no job or girlfriend. Desmond Boyle, the boss of the club, tried to get to know each other, as he does with all his customers, but in vain: “He seemed stubborn, depressed and resistant to any form of contact”, confides- he. Hadi Matar made no secret of his sympathies for Shiite extremists: on his Facebook page, his profile picture was an image of Ayatollah Khomeini. He had made himself a fake driver’s license bearing the identity of a Hezbollah military official killed in 2008 in Damascus, Syria. To know that Salman Rushdie was going to Chautauqua, an event that was altogether confidential, you had to be well informed.

At 10:45 a.m. on Friday morning, at the very start of the conference, he went into action, springing onto the stage, thrashing and stabbing his target a dozen times. Salman Rushdie was lucky: he owes his survival to the intervention of a “trooper”, a local policeman, who, with several members of the audience, rushed on Hadi Matar. The latter does not regret anything: he pleads not guilty. His mother was too desperate to talk to us when we ran into her Sunday night.

At the same time, Salman Rushdie, miraculously escaped from death although he risks serious consequences, joked again with his relatives on the phone. Humor, always. And the rage to live. At the instigation of Bernard-Henri Lévy, various French intellectuals claim for him the next Nobel Prize for Literature. Even if the very strict statutes of the Swedish academy make this attribution unlikely, perhaps this would indeed be the best way to help him, morally, to heal his wounds.