Last week, Salman Rushdie was assaulted at a public event in upstate New York and suffered serious injuries; he is still hospitalized today. In a statement after the attack, Knight Institute Executive Director Jameel Jaffer called Rushdie “a brilliant novelist and essayist, and a courageous, inspiring defender of free speech.” He added, “The attempt on his life is another reminder that we live in an era in which authoritarians target journalists, writers, and human rights advocates with impunity. Free speech won’t survive very long if we don’t respond more emphatically than we have.”

Earlier this year, Rushdie spoke to Jaffer and the Institute’s Larry Siems about lies, free speech, and democracy, discussing his growing concern that right now “the lie seems to be more powerful than the truth.”