Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay tuned. Preet Bharara.

David Remnick:

I don’t think an editor is duty bound to publish everything that crosses his or her desk for whatever reason, but I think when it comes to something like The Satanic Verses, if we are in a situation where a novel like that of that kind of daring is not getting published, then that’s a very, very sad state of affairs.

Preet Bharara:

That’s David Remnick. Since 1998, he’s been the editor of the New Yorker Magazine. Remnick is one praise for steering the storied publication into the modern era. What was once a weekly print magazine has become a sprawling online brand with podcasts, videos, and daily reporting. Remnick hosts one of those podcasts, the New Yorker Radio Hour. Every so often, Remnick returns to his roots and writes a long form article for the magazine and this week he’s out with a profile of the novelist Salman Rushdie, who last year was stabbed 15 times and nearly killed while on stage at a conference in New York State. Remnick joins me to discuss the unusual circumstances that led to that attack and we talk more broadly about the value of free speech and the price that Rushdie has paid for exercising it. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes from Twitter, user Cardma 18280708. I hope that’s not your password, Cardma. #askpree, would Fani Willis, SDNY and DOJ talk amongst themselves about indictment timing of Donald J. Trump? Could/would DOJ ever ask that they hold off? That’s an interesting question. Obviously you’re talking about the ongoing investigations certainly in Fulton County, Georgia, whose district attorney is Fani Willis and DOJ, which has multiple special counsels looking at the document issues at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere, and also people thinking about and investigating the conduct of Donald Trump on January 6th and the time leading up to January 6th.

SDNY for its part, it’s not clear to me what, if anything, they’re looking at still. There was talk recently about the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels that implicated and actually got convicted Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s prior lawyer. With respect to Fani Willis and SDNY, I don’t know why they would be talking to each other. There’s no indication to me that SDNY has any business or any interest or any jurisdiction over the conduct that happened with respect to the election in Georgia. Even if they had a common target, there’d be no reason for them to be speaking to each other, I don’t think, if the conduct they’re talking about is different and separate.

Now with respect to DOJ, it obviously is looking at January 6th. We suppose that its ambit is wide and broad and they’re not only looking at the events of January 6th itself, but what that was premised on, the big lie, and the conduct that took place on the part of Donald Trump and other people with respect to perpetuating the big lie and trying to overturn the results of the election. In that regard, I imagine there may be, although we don’t know, there may be some overlap in the investigative scope of DOJ and Fani Willis in Fulton County, Georgia.

I still think though, given the general policy of the department and the approach and demeanor of Merrick Garland as far as we’ve seen, that he believes his department is separate and apart from other prosecutors, that he’s not going to look like he’s putting the thumb on the scale either for or against a particular prosecution elsewhere, and in particular an independently elected local district attorney in Georgia. Probably it’s the case that they wouldn’t be asking some other independent DA to hold off. Now, sometimes that kind of thing happens. It happened when I was the United States attorney on more than one occasion where we’re looking at a particular target. There was a stockbroker who was stealing people’s money. His name was Ken Starr, different Ken Starr, and it turned out that as we were looking at that conduct, the Manhattan DA’s office was also looking at that conduct and we didn’t want to stumble over each other.

So we struck up a partnership and we made special assistant US attorneys out of a couple of assistant district attorneys and Cy Vance, the district attorney at the time, and I together did the case jointly in federal court when we finally arrested and began to prosecute the defendant in that case. This is nothing like that, so I don’t expect DOJ or SDNY to be telling Fani Willis anything.

This question comes in an email from Stacy who asks, “Is there a significance to the pattern of expenses, many amounting to exactly $199 and 99 cents, filed by the congressional campaign of now representative George Santos?” Now that’s a great question, Stacy, and a lot of people are asking it. More importantly, I think people are investigating it and it could lead to real significant legal consequences for George Santos. Now, everyone has been talking about him for some weeks now. Every other day there seems to be a new revelation about a lie or a prevarication that he has made in the past. We’ve discussed this on prior podcasts and we’ve also said that generally lying to the public, whether you like it or not, even if you’re running for federal office or even if you’re in federal office, is not a crime. Now, it may be different if you lie on required federal forms or you lie to government officials. It also may be a crime depending on what you lied about separate apart from the lie on the form.

For context, apparently George Santo’s campaign, as it’s required to do, made filings about expenses that the campaign incurred. As The Washington Post Reports, there were at least 40 expenses by the Santos campaign that were between $199 and $199.99 cents and 37 of them were precisely $199.99 cents. It sounds like the advertised sale price for a space heater or something like that. Phillip Bump of The Washington Post undertook the exercise of trying to replicate those expenses to go to restaurants and other places and try to come in exactly $199.99 cents and basically failed. A reporter from Slate tried to go to a restaurant in Little Neck Queens called El Baco, where apparently the Santos campaign, on seven different occasions, spent exactly $199. 99 cents.

The Slate reporter, however, could never get the cost to be exactly that because the tip always pushed him over. The Santos campaign also reported that five different Uber rides each also came in at $199.99 cents. They twice spent $199.99 at BJ’s wholesale, one time at Target, one time at Walgreens, twice at Staples, and three times at Best Buy. Why is all this peculiarity significant? Well, they’re regulations that are put out by the Federal Election Commission. In particular, there’s a regulation that requires that for each single disbursement that exceeds $200 by a campaign, the campaign must keep a receipt, invoice or canceled check. By that language and by the reckoning of the Santos campaign, if an expense was only $199.99 cents, you need not prove it by showing a receipt, canceled check or some other document.

Where does that lead us in terms of our conclusions? Well, probably it’s the case that those expenses listed for $199.99 cents were false. Why is that important? Well, if you’re converting campaign funds to your own use or you’re otherwise engaging in fraud with respect to campaign funds, that can be a crime. The Santos campaign, for whatever it’s worth, claims that these reported numbers are result of some kind of database error, whatever that means. Stay tuned.

This question comes from Twitter user Genie Ford who writes, “One question I have every week. How do you stand it? You have to live with all of this, read it all constantly, and yet you appear to be sane. I get so upset or have to have a timeout.” Well, thanks. Thanks for your generous comment about my apparent sanity. I get it. The constant news of the last number of years, the threats to democracy, the criminal investigations, some of which don’t go anywhere, all of it, it takes a toll, particularly if you care about the country and you care about democracy and you care about people getting along in this country and you care about unity, which clearly you do, and I do too.

I have a confession to make. I don’t always feel sane. I don’t always act sane. I yell and I get upset and I get frustrated too. I try to keep that away from the podcast because I don’t think it’s very productive, but I share your sentiments and I share your feelings and it’s been constant and it’s been brutal and I can’t get away with it because it’s part of how I make a living and reporting the news and analyzing the news every week, actually three times a week now in various podcasts and also commentary on television. I did take, I will say, a brief break from all of it. It was the Saturday after the election in November, 2020. That’s the day that the election was finally called for Joe Biden and people who believed that Donald Trump would be bad for the country in a second term were elated and celebrated. Some of them partied in the streets that day in New York City and elsewhere.

I partied quietly in my home and for the next several nights I didn’t watch the news. I didn’t focus on cable television and each of those nights for about three or four nights, and I tweeted about this, I watched for the first time in decades a Bollywood film that I remembered watching from my youth. That was my escape. But pretty quickly, when the big lie began to be perpetuated and all sorts of other things began happening, and certainly by the time January 6th rolled around, it was back to the roller coaster of news. How do I cope? How do I at least appear to be sane? I do what I think other people do. I try to maintain a sense of humor. I listen to comedy. I listen to music. During the course of the pandemic in the last few years, I’ve watched my fair share of television shows and streaming shows. I watched from beginning to end every single season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, two times. That helped.

Most importantly, spend time with people, don’t talk about politics, spend time with your family, spend time with your friends, making new friends if you can. That’s always a good idea. But I consider it to be an obligation of mine, not just a professional one, but a personal obligation to follow the news, call out the BS, and make sure that I can at least add my voice in whatever way I can to improve the country.

We’ll be right back with my conversation with David Remnick.

Since 1989, the celebrated author Salman Rushdie has been living under a fatwa or a kill order from the Iranian government. His crime, the publication of a novel, the Satanic Verses, that Iran’s supreme leader declared blasphemous. Last August, a young man stabbed Rushdie over a dozen times while on stage at a conference in western New York. Rushdie barely survived and is still recovering. New Yorker editor David Remnick, spoke with Rushdie for a profile out this week in the magazine.

David Remnick, welcome back to the show.

David Remnick:

It’s a pleasure to be here.

Preet Bharara:

It’s been a while. I think it’s been the entire duration of the pandemic since you’ve been on, so I appreciate it. We are going to spend a good amount of time talking about your newest piece. Why you write when you can just simply edit, I don’t know, maybe we’ll talk about that also. You have a profile of Salman Rushdie who has been in the news a lot. You talk about his saga and his recovery and his state of mind. Before I get to that, I’ve always been curious to ask people who write profiles like you do, what do you like about writing a profile?

David Remnick:

Wow, it depends on the who. What you hope for in a profile subject is somebody who is going to, I guess, maybe like in psychoanalysis, avail themself of the process as they say. In other words, who is not treating it as a trip to the dentist, which a lot of journalism is that because there are a lot of instances where the person you’re writing about or the institution you’re writing about, the last thing they want is press attention for whatever reason. You’re all too familiar with that. An instance like Salman Rushdie, he will tell you that he thinks his books and his stories are the most interesting thing about him, but sometimes the world disagrees and thinks that his life is more interesting. I think both are of incredible value despite the tragic dimension of what’s happened in his life. As a novelist, he is among the best we have. It’s a mystery to me why he has not won on purely literary merit the Nobel Prize for literature. Midnight’s Children is the-

Preet Bharara:

You’re lobbying for him.

David Remnick:

Well, at least speak in support, but I don’t speak Swedish.

Preet Bharara:

You speak Russian, though.

David Remnick:

For all the good that does these days. Midnight’s Children is the great novel of India that broke down all kinds of doors for even younger novelists to write in different kinds of English the stories of migration, the story of Bombay, the story of Indian independence and multiplicity, and so many things. A great novel written by somebody in his 30s, and there have been many since.

Preet Bharara:

So want to get back to you, David, for a second. I see you’ve wandered away from the question a little bit.

David Remnick:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

I love your profiles and the New Yorker always does a good job. I myself have been profiled in your magazine a long time ago, but when you write about somebody who you understandably admire, respect, whether it’s Springsteen or Obama or Rushdie, how do you think about your feelings about the subject when you do the profile?

David Remnick:

Well, I think something that’s a pure valentine is of no great value. That, as with fiction, you want to get into the complexity of that person and Salman Rushdie is no exception. But each profile represents a different kind of challenge. Sometimes you have all the time in the world with that person, so much so that you don’t even know what to do with it. Sometimes the person resists your invitations and doesn’t even want to deal with you, and that’s called a write around, you’re writing around the subject. Xi Jinping is not inviting Evan Osnos over for dinner.

Then there’s something like … so Rushdie was a particular and peculiar challenge. Just to remind your listeners, in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini put out a fatwa, a death sentence, on Rushdie for the sin of writing a novel. The novel was called The Satanic verses. Khomeini, for all kinds of complicated reasons, declared it blasphemous and so for the next 10 years, Rushdie lived like a fugitive in England and then came to America and lived much more freely in the past 20 years. I think he thought this fatwa and this threat was more or less behind him. Last summer in August, he went to Chatauqua in western New York just south of Buffalo to do a speaking engagement on stage. He’s done a million of them. He’s very at ease in doing these things, and some guy, 24 year old guy named Hadi Matar, of Lebanese parents, but born here and raised in California in New Jersey, leapt up on stage and stabbed him at least 15 times before he’s finally pulled off of him.

It’s an absolute miracle that Rushdie was not killed. He lost the sight in one eye. His hand operates poorly. Hi liver was injured. All kinds of terrible … he was stabbed in the neck. Had it been a quarter of an inch one way or another, it would’ve hit his carotid artery and he would’ve bled out immediately. So he’s very lucky to be alive and he was in the hospital for six weeks and I asked him, very gently after a while anyway, about doing an interview and for all kinds of reasons he decided to do it. I think the main reason is that it was time, but he also has, quite frankly, a novel coming out and he can’t do a book tour. The normal thing would be he would go on your show and he would go on this show and he would speak at a bookstore or an auditorium or the 92nd Street Y or whatever it might be. He can’t do that now. He’s suffering from physically and mentally the aftermath of this near death experience in front of well over a thousand people.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s go back and tell the story a little bit more slowly. It’s 1989, he had just written the prior year, or published the prior year, The Satanic Verses and Ayatollah Khomeini, as you described, issued this fatwa death sentence on summon Rushdie, and others. We’ll get to the others in a moment. What was the perceived sin of The Satanic Verses that prompted the fatwa?

David Remnick:

The perceived sin was blasphemy, that he had insulted the prophet Muhammad, that he had written things about the origin story of Islam that Khomeini, who was not just the head of state but also the chief theologian of the Islamic Republic of Iran, deemed blasphemous. Now, nevermind that he never read the book, according to Khomeini’s son, Khomeini was in political trouble. The revolution was in 1979, he comes to power, but then he fought a decade long war against Iraq. That was just a disaster. Just hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people dead and this did nothing for Khomeini’s political standing and his popularity in Iran. It is now considered this was his motivation, that it was like a populist thing that he could do to declare war on a blasphemous, by the way, Muslim, Indian-born novelist for the sin of writing an imaginative work of fiction. So that’s what happened.

Preet Bharara:

You quote someone in your piece as saying the edict “was a sign of weakness rather than of strength”, and as you put it, a matter more of politics than theology

David Remnick:

I think that’s right.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to talk about the fact that often gets obscured and overlooked. The fatwa was not only against Salman Rushdie, but all those involved in the publication of that book. What were the consequences of the breadth of that?

David Remnick:

The consequences of that were, for example, his Japanese and his Italian translators were stabbed. Consequences were that there were threats to the lives of publishers all around the world. Bombs went off in Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley, California, and Rushdie himself for 10 years, from 1989 to the end of the century, lived with members of an elite part of the London security apparatus at all times. Constantly intelligence agencies were picking up all kinds of threats directed at Rushdie, so he lived underground for 10 years. The consequences were immense and it also presaged so much of what characterized or even infected our world to come, which was the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in its violent form and the reaction to it. It raised questions about speech in the most dramatic ways. It suggested something about the power of a book in this world that in the West at least we had not seen. I mean, if you lived in the Soviet Union and you knew about the experience of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, you knew something about the power of dissent.

Preet Bharara:

Can you take us into Rushdie’s mind a little bit in those first 10 years? Do you have a sense of how he thinks about the harm that befell these other people involved in the publication or the translation of the book that he wrote?

David Remnick:

Sure. I think he feels horrible about it, but quite rightly doesn’t think it was his fault. It’s the fault of Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers and people who carried out these terrible acts. What you’re hinting at, I think, by inference, or at least I’ll draw it out, is that a lot of people, a lot of people in the literary world, in the political world blamed Salman Rushdie for “bringing this upon himself”.

Preet Bharara:

Yep. No, we’re going to get to that. There are two sentences in your piece that are very striking. You write after the headlines came, people behaved well, people behaved disgracefully. First, tell us about the people who behaved well.

David Remnick:

I think a lot of people behaved well. I think first of all, Salman had a lot of friends in London by that time who rallied around him and called and lent him houses and expressed their support as best they could. I mean, to the credit of the British government, they provided what they should have, which was round the clock protection. On the other hand, they were members of the same British government who expressed their contempt for Rushdie. They didn’t like him. I’ll be very honest with you, I think some of it was racist, some of it was that it was a big giant political inconvenience because after all, there were a lot of people on the streets marching against Rushdie and they vote. And they vote, and that was a dilemma for people. So you saw politicians …

By the way, according to Martin Amis, Martin Amis, the novelist, he was at a dinner at which the then Prince of Wales, now the King of England said, “Well, what do you expect when someone insults something that you care about so much?” Meaning what did Rushdie expect if he was going to insult Islam? That kind of sentiment you heard come out of the mouths of people like John LeCarre, Jermaine Greer, the foreign secretary Jeffrey Howe, Jimmy Carter. Many, many people.

Preet Bharara:

Is there a distinction between saying, “You brought the fatwa on yourself,” and saying, “Yeah, that was insulting to devout Muslims, maybe it wasn’t a great idea.” Is there a distinction there?

David Remnick:

I think if you stop before maybe it wasn’t a great idea because the implication is then you brought it on yourself. Look, Martin Scorsese made a movie called The Last Temptation of Christ. Many Christians were insulted by this film in one way or another. But the Pope, no matter what you think of the Pope, the Pope did not issue an order to declaring that Martin Scorsese should be executed on the streets in New York. Any number of works of literature have been published that are … I’m Jewish, that are insulting to Jews in one way or another and the head rabbi of London does not declare a death sentence on the author.

Preet Bharara:

No, of course, that’s what I’m trying to separate criticism of the … to the extent it’s separable, criticism of the ideas and depictions in a book from suffering a fatwa and a stabbing because of the content of a book.

David Remnick:

The fatwa distinctly … not only did it say that this book was blasphemous, it gave the prescription of what ought to be done in direct language that Rushdie and everyone who knowingly assisted him, meaning his publishers and translators and all the rest, should be killed. When Rushdie, against his better instincts, and I think out of a sense of panic to protect not only himself, but everybody involved, agreed to meet some Muslim leaders in London, against his better instinct, he issued a series of statements expressing contrition. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s reaction to this was … let’s just say he wasn’t impressed.

Preet Bharara:

Day late and dollar short?

David Remnick:

And that even if he became the most pious man on earth, he should still be killed.

Preet Bharara:

Is that, because, again, going back to what you said earlier, because of a deep-seated religious opposition to blasphemy or did it persistent at being political?

David Remnick:

Because it’s possible to be both a religious leader, as history as shown, and a murderer at the same time.

Preet Bharara:

So for the first 10 years, the lifestyle that Rushdie led was kind of insane. As you point out, round the clock protection, moved every few days as if he was a sought after member of the Taliban. Then a decade in, he changed his lifestyle.

David Remnick:

He moved to New York is the most important thing. He moved to New York and he basically made a new determination, “I’m not going to live in the old way. I’m going to live my life fully, freely in every sense,” almost to an exaggerated degree.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he became very conspicuous and he-

David Remnick:

He became very conspicuous.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, even I was at a dinner with him once some years ago. If they let me in, they let anybody in.

David Remnick:

He determined that, “I’m going to work hard at my desk during the day. I’m going to have fun at night,” and he was out and about. He went to ball games, he went out dancing, he went to restaurants. He lived a life that he wanted to pursue. He got married, he got divorced, he got married, he got divorced again. He was on page six.

Preet Bharara:

He did a couple more times, actually.

David Remnick:

I think people, and the press coverage sometimes reflected this, there were people who resented this.

Preet Bharara:

Well, let’s go right to your article again, because this is a lovely piece in your piece where you write, “Many years ago, Rushdie recalled, there were people who seemed to grow tired of his persistent existence.” Then you quote him as saying, “People didn’t like it because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. That was my mistake back then. Not only did I live, but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get 15 stab wounds, much better.”

David Remnick:

He’s obviously being quite bitterly humorous there.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but he feels the truth of that.

David Remnick:

Right, because people like a nice neat story. In other words, I’ll go back to Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn, from my Russia days, was a figure out of the 19th century. He defied the Czar, the Communist Party. He wrote the Gulag Archipelago about the Gulag system. He was forcibly exiled from Russia, but he didn’t move to New York. He didn’t go out dancing. He didn’t become a modern American guy. He moved to a remote part of Vermont and he lived like a literary hermit. He had very few visitors, did not live in what you and I think of as the real world, if there is such a thing, and he wrote and wrote and wrote until it became possible to go back to Russia, and he did and then he died. That’s not Rushdie, that’s not how he wanted to live. He wanted to live the way he lived, and he did it until August of last year with gusto.

Preet Bharara:

Look, there’s a remarkable statistic in your piece, and that is that during the time since the fatwa was issued, which was some decades ago, Rushdie has written 16 books. That’s pretty prolific,

David Remnick:

Right, which is triple what he had written before the fatwa. The books are not about the fatwa with the exception of Joseph Anton, which is a novel, a memoir rather. He wanted to live his literary life the best he could as if the fatwa had not happened.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he says an interesting thing in your article. “If you came from another planet and you looked at all my books, the ones before and after the fatwa, you wouldn’t recognize or appreciate that something dramatic happened to me in 1989.’

David Remnick:

That’s quite an achievement.

Preet Bharara:

Is it an achievement? Would there be anything wrong with putting more of that experience into subsequent books?

David Remnick:

Well, he did. Again, he wrote a very long comprehensive memoir, Joseph Anton, in which he tells the story straight. It’s a book that’s filled with narrative power, but it’s also filled with differing emotions in reaction to it. Sometimes it’s an angry book and sometimes it’s a bitter book, an even vindictive at times, and honest and charming. It’s all over the place in that way in the best sense.

Preet Bharara:

What’s more important than that book he wrote? His appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David.

David Remnick:

We’ll tell you listeners what you’re referring to. Six years ago he was on Curb Your Enthusiasm. The plot line was that Larry David was writing a musical called Fatwa the Musical. I mean, only Larry David gets away with-

Preet Bharara:

And he insults the Ayatollah, or the Ayatollah Khomeini felt offended.

David Remnick:

The Ayatollah gets on TV and he declares his hatred for Larry David, he’s going to come get him. Larry David dresses up in a wig and he’s terrified and he seeks the advice of one Salman Rushdie. Rushdie basically says, “It’s a little scary, it’s true, but there’s pixie dust to it and makes you more attractive to women and you get the best kind of sex there is. Fatwa sex.” Now, this was hilarious at the time-

Preet Bharara:

One of the best plot lines of any episode, send your mail to David Remnick.

David Remnick:

It’s unbelievably funny and yet to look back on it through the prism of what happened last August, he made a decision, “not only am I going to live out in the open and as rigorously as I possibly can, I’m even going to try to render the fatwa absurd and ridiculous by going on Larry David and making fatwa jokes.” For 20 years in the United States, everything that happened, at least to him personally, confirmed that this was a wise strategy. Now he’s faced with the horrendous dilemma if he did or did not make a mistake. I said, “Did you make a mistake?” and he said, “Well, on the one hand, I have to think that through now. I’m stuck with that. Not only do I not have a vision in my right eye and my hand doesn’t work properly and all the rest of it, I’m haunted by this dilemma.

On the other hand, I wanted to live my life. I’m now 75 and I’ve written all these books by living as a free man and I’ve had the life I’ve had and to regret your life is a paradox. If you regret your life, you didn’t have a life.”

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with David Remnick after this.

Do you think Rushdie and his views about the absolutism surrounding free speech has shifted a lot? Or do you think he always had the view he does now about the importance of free speech?

David Remnick:

Well, any number of things exemplified his view of free speech. But one thing in particular, it’s not covered at any length in the piece, you could have spent 10,000 words on this alone, in 2015, some radicals, if that’s the word for them, broke into the editorial offices of the French Satirical Magazine Charlie Hebdo, because the magazine had published cartoons that were considered blasphemous and they murdered most of the staff using automatic weapons. Then later that week, there was also, you might remember, related murders at a kosher supermarket in Paris. You remember those days, people would wear t-shirts and carry banners, Je suis Charlie, I am Charlie Hebdo, great demonstrations of solidarity. Sometime later that year, PEN the great group that, in fact, Rushdie had been president of PEN America, was having its gala dinner and it wanted to give a kind of courage award to the surviving members of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, which was something that Rushdie was certainly behind, certainly in favor of.

But a couple of weeks, I forget how long, before the dinner, some writers, very decent people, talented people, said, “Look, we don’t want to come to the dinner because we feel that although no one should be murdered for whatever they write or draw or publish, we don’t want to seem to valorize a magazine that they thought could be racist,” that they just couldn’t get behind what Charlie Hebdo published. Rushdie is not sometimes the most subtle foe in argument and he called those people pussies on Twitter and also I think referred to them as six authors in search of a character, which is a pun on the Pirandello play Six Characters in Search of an Author, and friendships broke up over that little explosion. But Rushdie to this day I know thinks he was right and those writers were wrong, I happen to agree with Rushdie, and I think he sees most of the violations when it comes to speech and libraries and Ron DeSantis and all this kind of thing, most of the sins ae on the right, but in his view, also there are sins on the left.

Preet Bharara:

Where are we today on this question of how much speech, even speech that’s offensive to certain groups or to many groups, how much it should be protected? For example, I think someone is quoted in your piece of saying that it would be very difficult to publish a version of The Satanic Verses today.

David Remnick:

Hanif Kureishi, who unfortunately is now in a hospital bed having suffered a terrible fall-

Preet Bharara:

And he’s tweeting about it, live tweeting about it. We talked about him on the podcast a few weeks ago.

David Remnick:

Terrific person and himself ran into trouble early in his career with a film called My Beautiful Laundrette, but nothing like Salman’s situation. Kureishi said that it’s hard to imagine that anybody would write that novel or publish it. I don’t know. It seems to me that there are plenty of books-

Preet Bharara:

But if you’re a major publisher, you’re going to think twice and my question is it okay to think twice or I don’t have a view on this when you’re balancing the safety-

David Remnick:

Well, there’s the difference between publishing, editing and censoring. Sometimes I’ll get into, let’s call it, a conversation with a writer and artist and if the conversation, and it’s probably happened a couple times in 20 odd years, but the artist is not getting their way, they’ll say, “I’m censoring them rather than editing,” or not accepting the piece. I don’t think an editor is duty bound to publish everything that crosses his or her desk for whatever reason. But I think when it comes to something like The Satanic Verses, if we are in a situation where a novel like that of that kind of daring is not getting published, then that’s a very, very sad state of affairs. It’s hard to quantify if that’s happening or not.

Preet Bharara:

I just wonder if you are a magazine editor or you are the head of a publishing house and you have reason to believe, even though it’s horrible and vile and you would be opposed to it, you have reason to believe that the people who are involved in the publishing of the manuscript might be harmed or killed, how do you do that calculus in your head?

David Remnick:

It’s very difficult and I think this is one instance where Salman, with respect, was too hard, arguably, on at least one person. In his memoir, Joseph Anton, he’s pretty tough on one publisher because that publisher, facing the possibility of having his staff harmed and they were legitimate threats coming their way, argued for the compromise of delaying paperback publication and stood behind the initial publication. Look, Salman Rushdie is a human being and was placed in a situation of the kind of stress … when I hear people talk about stress now, I mean it’s just a laughable fraction of what somebody in that kind of situation is like. Was everything that came out of his mouth, everything he did was exactly right in time? Maybe not. I think I say in the piece that he was hard on these publishers.

Preet Bharara:

You think overly hard?

David Remnick:

It is a real dilemma. But on the other hand, above all, if we bow to this kind of pressure and make the editor of your publishing house, the Ayatollah Khomeini or some other tyrant, then we are screwed. The foundation of that which is so endangered now, liberal democracy, is free speech, freedom of expression. Without it, we’re lost. Absolutely lost. We can have all kinds of arguments about this or that at this university or that, and one can argue about cancel culture, whether you put quotes around it or not, you can have this discussion until the cows come home. But underlying it all is that freedom of expression and free speech have to be the foundation of liberal democracy. This is a great achievement of the countries that have that and it’s an incredibly precious thing. I don’t just say that because I’m an editor or a writer and I’m in the business so called. It’s just as a citizen-

Preet Bharara:

Maybe that’s one of the reasons you are in that profession.

David Remnick:

But it has to be, and if you start chipping away at that, that way it can lie real madness.

Preet Bharara:

Assess for me, if you will, whether we’re thinking more intelligently and expansively about the issues you just mentioned, speech, today versus 30 years ago, are we more or less tolerant of speech that we disagree with as a country?

David Remnick:

It’s hard to say. I see what you’re getting at. My greatest concern these days when it comes to that, and it’s not because I’m a Democrat rather than a Republican or a liberal rather than a conservative, although I am, but when I see the issue distorted, exaggerated and exploited for political gain as it is in the state of Florida, for example, that is just a terrible trend, a terrible trend. We see it all the time. We’re seeing books uprooted from libraries.

Preet Bharara:

In 2023.

David Remnick:

In 2023. We’re seeing curricular stripped of this author and that author and this theory and that theory for political gain. Nothing more, political gain. I think that is a very, very serious thing. Do I think sometimes there are foolish things said on the left about this or that? Sure, but I think overwhelmingly the great danger is a reactionary danger. I’m sure we all hear this or that story about one student in a undergraduate class refusing to read this or that. I just think that’s self injurious. I just think it’s a kind of performative … if in the cases that it’s true, it’s a performative kind of politics for the most part that doesn’t do that student any good, whether it’s refusing to read a novel or a piece of political theory because it doesn’t accord with our sense of what’s right and decent. I just think that that’s hurting yourself. When the state orders that, that hurts us all.

Preet Bharara:

I want to jump ahead to August of 2022 when Salman Rushdie is attacked and stabbed and almost killed. In some ways he can be forgiven for living openly and notoriously after 10 years of hiding and then another 20 some odd years of doing that and not coming to any harm. The Ayatollah Khomeini who issued and imposed the fatwa was then gone. Was there a change in feeling from Iranian leaders about the fatwa thereafter?

David Remnick:

There was a moment where it seemed that Iran was stepping away from the fatwa and then not. I’ll tell you how I know the and not part. 10 years ago I was invited to … Well, you know how the UN gathers everybody from all over the world in the early fall or the world leaders come here.

Preet Bharara:

And you can’t drive anywhere.

David Remnick:

You can’t get anywhere on the east side, which is fine with me on the west side. I loved going to the Iran one, because you don’t get this opportunity very often. It’s not the Ayatollah that comes, but rather the president. Hilariously one year I went and they serve you a breakfast and the breakfast that year was lox and bagels, I kid you not. We were then summoned into this room and it’s Ahmadinejad, if you remember him, who was pretty awful in many ways, and at a certain point in the gathering, I don’t know how many people were there, 15, 20 reporters, editors, I had the chance to ask a question and I asked about Rushdie. This would’ve been Ahmadinejad’s chance to say, “Oh, no, no, no, the fatwa, that’s an oldie but a goodie, but don’t worry about it, it’s over.”

He said no such thing. In fact, he, with a very nasty looking smile on his face, made a kind of threatening joke about Rushdie that made it all too clear he knew I was going to quote him, and what does that tell a certain kind of reader? That the light switch is still on for the fatwa. So it never went out and if you followed social media, it was very clear that you would be praised for this in those circles if you carried it out. So what happened in life, you have a kid, Hadi Matar, his parents were from a village in southern Lebanon. They immigrated to the United States, first to California, then to New Jersey. They divorced. The father goes back to Lebanon and Matar is … he’s not much of a student and he does what people do, is that he goes back and he visits his father for a little while.

The trip doesn’t go well. Something happened during the trip. We’re not clear what, we know very little about this, and he came back and he was more religious, more withdrawn, lives in his mother’s basement, plays video games, reads the Qur’an and other books, works out at a gym in North Bergen, New Jersey, not too far from where I grew up. The guy who runs the gym who I talked to said, “I just couldn’t get to first base with this guy. He just every day looked like the worst day of his life.” He quits the gym in early August, sends an email to the gym and on the header of the email is a little photograph of Ayatollah Khomeini, who’s the spiritual and power of Iran now and effectively the head of state, and he finds out on the internet that Rushdie is going to speak in Chatauqua.

He buys a bus ticket to Buffalo, takes a Lyft to Chicago, buys a ticket to Chatauqua, sleeps on the ground at night, goes the next morning to the speaking engagement, jumps up on stage dressed in black, and he stabs a novelist 15 times, intending to kill him. He didn’t get this idea from nowhere. It may be that he spoke to someone in Lebanon, maybe he didn’t. Maybe the internet does the job. Maybe he’s just a lost kid. Maybe it’s all those things. But the fact of the matter, had there not been the fatwa, Solomon Rushdie would be in much better shape today.

Preet Bharara:

Tell folks what the legal status of Matar is.

David Remnick:

He’s in jail in Mayville, New York awaiting trial and he’s got two charges against him. I believe he’s charged with second degree murder, attempted murder rather, and he faces up to 30 years in prison.

Preet Bharara:

He’s being represented by …

David Remnick:

Public defender.

Preet Bharara:

Public defender, who said some interesting things about his client. I’m not quite sure what to make of this quote. “I’ve had absolutely no problems with Mr. Matar. He has been cordial and respectful, openly discussing things with me. He is a very sincere young man. It would be like meeting any young man. There’s nothing that sets him apart,” except that he tried to stab to death a novelist in front of a thousand people.

David Remnick:

Yeah, you’re adding the last part, but of course you’re right. Look, it’s not easy being a public defender, as you know.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not.

David Remnick:

They’re overworked, they’re underpaid, they have too many cases, and suddenly this guy has a case of global importance. I got the impression that what he was trying to tell me is, and you would know this better than I, Preet, that sometimes clients just are totally not cooperative. They just think the world is all against them, including the public defender and, “Screw you. Why should I talk to you?” What he’s saying is that’s not the case. But I don’t think we know very much about him. Much of what we know … I have to say as a reporter, I showed up on the doorstep of the Matar household in New Jersey, but by that time I think the lawyers had shut them down quite reasonably. So the little that we do know comes from a I think a pretty brief interview that a New York Post reporter did with Matar when he was in prison and some very hurried, on the street interviews with the mother in the day or two after the attempted murder.

Preet Bharara:

You ask Rushdie what he thinks about Matar, the man who tried to kill him, and he says something very interesting. He says some version of, “I don’t know enough about him to know what I think about him.”

David Remnick:

“He’s an idiot,” he says, but then he pauses and he says, “But I don’t really know him. Only an idiot would give that interview to the New York Post, and I guess I’ll learn more about him at the trial.”

Preet Bharara:

He didn’t say only an idiot would try to stab someone in front of a thousand people. He said, “Only an idiot would do the interview with the New York Post,” which I found interesting.

David Remnick:

Exactly. He’s not very press savvy. But to generalize, and maybe it’s not fair to do so, but I went ahead and made the comparison. One of the writers that’s very influenced by Rushdie of another generation is Zadie Smith, who grew up in London and surrounded by people from other places, in her case West Indies, but also South Asia and all the rest. In her first novel, which was published when she was 24, White Teeth, there’s a character who is radicalized, terribly unsophisticated, and there’s a scene of him walking to a demonstration clearly against Satanic Verses, against Rushdie, and one of his friends says, “Did you read the book?” and he says, “No, of course not.” All of the rage, or the vast, vast, vast majority of it was ginned up by a very shrewd and cynical leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the effects of it are long-lasting.

Preet Bharara:

How is he doing? How has he spent the last six months? You write in your piece that among the things he’s been doing over the last six months is binge-watching TV shows and he has views of some of those shows.

David Remnick:

He does.

Preet Bharara:

You want to share his-

David Remnick:

Yeah, he didn’t like any of the characters in White Lotus. He found the Harry and Megan documentary a bore. He was really into the World Cup, but … Look, he lost his eye. He’s 75 years old, recovering from these wounds is not easy in any case, and he does say that he has some form of PTSD and writing is difficult and so on. But as he would put it, all things considered, and this was a colossal attack, he’s doing okay, but he’s got a lot of things to think about. How he’s going to live his life going forward is one of them. For example, he wrote a play during the pandemic about Helen of Troy called Helen, and it’s scheduled to open in London in some months from now. Does he go? What kind of security would he have? All these things that for the last 20 years he really wasn’t that concerned with suddenly become haunted.

Preet Bharara:

It sounds like, in your telling, the principle emotion he feels is gratitude even though this terrible thing happened to him.

David Remnick:

Well, I think he’s grateful to be alive. He’s grateful for the people who leapt up on the stage and pulled this person off of him and, as he puts it, put a thumb on his neck to stop the bleeding. He’s grateful to his surgeons. He’s now married again to a woman named Eliza Griffiths, who is a poet and novelist. He’s grateful to her and to his two sons. So yeah, he’s grateful, but he’s also … and again, I feel three degrees of absurd speaking for him here, but if I can do that with, I think, a minimal amount of presumption, he’s filled with all kinds of emotions. Above all, I think part of it is he’s an artist and he wants to be practicing his art and he wants to write and that hasn’t been easy.

Preet Bharara:

As a physical matter?

David Remnick:

As an intellectual matter, as a matter of sitting down and having the clarity of concentration and thought and imagination that’s required of a novelist at that level.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he says, you quote him as saying, “I’ve simply never allowed myself to use the phrase writer’s block,” and not to adopt the role of a victim, pretty extraordinary how prolific he’s been and that he’s been as productive as he has been, even while recovering from a major stabbing.

David Remnick:

I should say, we haven’t mentioned it, but I think this is one of his best novels in a while, Victory City. It’s a deeply enjoyable book. It sounds crazy in the light of our conversation, but it’s enormous fun. It’s a kind of fantastical telling of the creation of a South Indian empire in medieval times. I think Salmon Rushdie would’ve wanted nothing more than for him to be on this show instead of me and talking about a book instead of a stabbing.

Preet Bharara:

Can you put in a good word with him?

David Remnick:

I’d be happy to.

Preet Bharara:

We could have him on. Do you think he has any regrets about the last 33 years?

David Remnick:

I think he has regrets that there was ever a fatwa. I do not think he regrets for one minute writing The Satanic Verses because that came into the world as an artistic imperative, and that’s what he’s all about.

Preet Bharara:

He says something extraordinary. He says many extraordinary things, but he said something that has really stuck with me and you say you’re in a conversation over Zoom with him and he says, “I’ve got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don’t. I’ve always interviewed writers like Gunter Grass who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don’t have that so all I can do is this.” He’s not really regretting that he’s merely one the great novelists of the world, right?

David Remnick:

No, I think he just regrets not having … Look, most of us don’t have one great talent, much less two.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know what to make of that lament.

David Remnick:

I think it exercises different part of the brain and Gunter Grass drew. In fact, a lot of the images that come up in his novels, Rats, Flounder, were subjects for his drawings and his etchings and all the rest. There are some artists who just they write, but they also play piano or do something else. Rushdie doesn’t have that. I think that’s what he was referring to.

Preet Bharara:

I was going to say it’s like when Michael Jordan decided he wanted to play baseball.

David Remnick:

And look what a great idea that was.

Preet Bharara:

Be happy you have one skill.

David Remnick:

If he hadn’t played baseball, LeBron would be breaking his scoring record now instead of Kareem Abdul Jabar’s.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you if there’s something, and I apologize if this is a lame question. In reporting and interviewing people and talking to Rushdie at the great length that you did, and you’re already a pretty wise man, did you learn something new about human spirit, about courage, about human interaction? Not about the First Amendment and free speech, but about people?

David Remnick:

It’s a terrific question, and I found unforgettable. I hadn’t seen him in years. I mean, even in the best of circumstances I probably wouldn’t have because of the pandemic. I arrived early, as I always do for this kind of thing, to Andrew Wiley’s office. That’s his agent in Midtown. I was there half an hour early and I’m waiting for Rushdie and the WNYC and New Yorker radio hour engineers setting up his equipment because we’re also broadcasting at least part of the interview and down the hall, I heard the door open and heard his voice and he’s greeting people he hadn’t seen for a long time, and the sight of him was startling. He was thinner or as he put it, “It’s not the kind of diet I would recommend,” and he’s got one lens of his eyeglasses is blacked out.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, there’s a full page picture in the article-

David Remnick:

That’s right, a very startling one.

Preet Bharara:

That shows him in his glasses.

David Remnick:

He’s looking like John Ford or the Hathaway shirt man or whatever, make your own jokes. God knows he does. And he’s weary. I didn’t want to ask a fancy question to begin the interview. My question was kind of the way we began, which, “How are you?” That was a lot to unpack and it was visceral to be in his presence and to hear this and to have some sense of the historical importance of what had transpired over these 30 odd years. But also just the visceral human presence of having to live through it and reach this point in one human life. So yes, I’m taking notes, I’m making sure the recorder is working or my partner is, and all those technical things that you have to do, thinking about questions that’ll follow up, all those things, but I was really moved by and affected by particularly those opening minutes of the conversation. I’ll never forget that.

Preet Bharara:

I would like you to tell the listeners what you told me before we started recording with respect to autocorrect on your phone because that’s the most interesting fact I learned about you in a while.

David Remnick:

My last name autocorrects to redneck.

Preet Bharara:

Do you leave it? Do you leave it as David Redneck?

David Remnick:

Here, I’m going to make a confession and everybody … I don’t know how to fix it. So maybe, Preet, you can help me with this terrible dilemma in life. How do I fix an autocorrect that seems to be a personal rebuke?

Preet Bharara:

Well, I gave you a parallel solution. You should have your own name in your phone book and your context list and then Remnick, I think, will no longer-

David Remnick:

All right. I’ll do that. If that changes, I’m holding you to this. I’m holding you to this. I’ll owe you a beer and then some.

Preet Bharara:

David Redneck, thank you so much for being … did I get that right?

David Remnick:

Once I did a long interview … as a kid with The Washington Post, I was interviewing William F. Buckley and somebody obviously slipped … either he was screwing with me, which is entirely possible, or he was misinformed, and throughout the entire interview he kept referring to me is Mr. Dempkin. I never corrected him. Maybe I was too terrified. I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

Well, my name is almost never pronounced correctly, and there’s always that moment of truth when I have a speaking engagement somewhere, whether they’ve done the homework or not, particularly in the early days when I was in office and wasn’t that well known. My favorite was I was speaking front of a trade group of … maybe they were hedge fund traders at the time, which is kind of ironic.

David Remnick:

They could have afforded to look it up.

Preet Bharara:

The guy is like, “Now we’re going to hear from the United States Attorney,” and there’s a pause and it’s a very telltale pause, “The United States Attorney … Preet.”

David Remnick:

Just Preet.

Preet Bharara:

He decides to just abandon completely and totally the last name.

David Remnick:

Bharara. They screw it up in a million different ways.

Preet Bharara:

In a million different ways, but I’ve never been called redneck.

David Remnick:

Or Dempkin

Preet Bharara:

Or Dempkin.

David Remnick:

Well, live long enough and you might.

Preet Bharara:

David Remnick, thanks for your piece, thanks for your continued writing and your thoughtfulness, and thanks for being on the show.

David Remnick:

Always a pleasure.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with David Remnick continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

I want to end the show this week by paying tribute to someone you probably have never heard of, someone I hadn’t thought about in years, but who was very important in developing how I thought about the law. His name is R. Kent Greenawalt and he was my very first law professor at Columbia Law School. This was back in 1990 when he was a wise 54, and I was a childlike 22. How Could Professor Greenawalt have been my first law professor? Didn’t I take many classes at once? Yes, but back in the day, we spent the first three weeks of law school divided up into sections, and each section had a professor. Mine was Kent Greenawalt. The class was called Legal Methods. It was meant to introduce you to law school and the many concepts and terms that were about to become everyday vocabulary for us. It was not about substance so much, but about method.

How do you read a case? How do you interpret a statute? How do you analyze an issue? What is the holding of a case? What is dicta? Legal Methods, in other words, was meant to give you some grounding and context before you were thrown into the black letter law world of torts and contracts and civil procedure. We had class every day for several hours. I found Legal Methods both bewildering and exciting. We were all these budding lawyer wannabees, learning how to handle Socratic method. I remember that one of my classmates and soon-to-be friends, Jonathan Wright, was asked a tough question by Professor Greenawalt and he gave a pretty good answer. The professor asked, “Remind me your name,” and my friend answered in the strong voice, “I am Mr. Wright.” A hundred law students cracked up.

I’m telling you all of this because Professor Greenawalt passed away on Thursday, January 27th at 86 after a nine-year battle with Alzheimer’s. I’m also probably a bit nostalgic about my time in his class as my 30th law school reunion is coming up this year. I thought I’d share a bit more about Professor Greenawalt’s fascinating life and career. The professor grew up in Westchester in the 1940s. His mother was a philosopher and an activist for gender equality. His father was a trial lawyer known for taking religious discrimination cases. Professor Greenawalt brought this philosophical and moral orientation into his own career. After graduating from Swarthmore and Columbia Law School, Greenawalt work as an attorney for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law in Jackson, Mississippi during the tense summer of 1965.

He went on to serve on the Civil Rights Committee of the New York City Bar Association. He also spent time in Washington clerking for Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan and serving as Deputy Solicitor General in the DOJ in the early 1970s. But it was his time teaching and writing as a Columbia professor from 1965 onwards with only brief hiatuses until shortly before his death and in both the law school and the Department of Philosophy that defined his career. His scholarship, more than a dozen books, including three after his diagnosis, zoomed in on some of the most difficult national issues; flag burning, obscenity, harassment, and more. His work was perhaps most focused, however, on the role of religion in American law and life.

Greenawalt was appreciated not only by me, but by so many of his law students who even coined a term [inaudible 01:04:20] to discuss his style. He routinely had his students over to his home where they would discuss thorny legal issues over tea, coffee, and powdered donuts, and many of these students have also offered tributes like this since his passing. So thank you Professor Greenawalt for the role you played in bringing so many of us toward a deeper understanding of law and justice. Rest in peace.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, David Remnick. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag AskPreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24 PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The cafe team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.