The person who was scheduled to conduct an interview with Salman Rushdie in New York State just before the renowned author was attacked stated on Sunday that he initially believed someone was playing a cruel joke before being startled into reality when he saw blood.
Rushdie was stabbed in the neck and abdomen on Friday by an assailant who stormed the stage of a literary event; Henry Reese, the president of the nonprofit organisation City of Asylum, was also hurt; he recalled taking a few seconds to realise what was happening.
“It was very difficult to understand. It looked like a sort of bad prank and it didn’t have any sense of reality,” Reese, 73, told CNN.
“Then when there was blood behind him, it became real.”
Reese declined to share specifics of the incident when he made an appearance on the network on Sunday with a big bandage covering his bruised and swollen right eye.
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However, he claimed that when a man sprinted onstage, he believed it was a “poor reference” to the religious order that Iran’s authorities had issued asking for Muslims to kill Rushdie and “not that it was a serious attack.”
Staff members and other audience members wrestled the alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, to the ground before taking him into jail.
After Iranian leaders begged for his murder because of how he depicted Islam and the Prophet Mohammed in his book “The Satanic Verses,” Rushdie spent years living under police protection.
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Reese claimed that he was going to talk to Rushdie about the City of Asylum initiative, which aims to defend free speech and was started by Reese after attending a motivational speech by Rushdie in 1997.
“That is the grim sort of irony — or maybe intention — to not only assault his body, but to assault everything that he represented,” Reese said.
(With inputs from agencies)
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