She usually so discreet, with a rare word, could not remain silent in the face of the drama that unfolded on August 12 in New York, when her friend Salman Rushdie was stabbed several times. Mylène Farmer spoke in the pages of Sunday newspaper.
The star, devastated by this tragedy, said: “Salman is a writer that I love and who has touched me for many years, but today he is the man, the friend, of whom I am thinking. I send him all my love.” Nice words of support for the 75-year-old novelist, hospitalized in serious condition after receiving more than a dozen stab wounds from an assailant named Hadi Matar. The attacker, possibly attracted by the bounty of 3 million dollars against the head of Salman Rushdie since he was targeted by a fatwa, pleaded not guilty after his arrest… As for the novelist, he managed to say a few words and even joke a little according to initial reports from relatives, but he could lose an eye and his liver was badly affected during the attack.
The friendship between Mylène Farmer and Salman Rushdie is not known to everyone. the JDD looks back on this meeting between two artists not really from the same universe. It goes back to the 1990s, in a London art gallery. “Mylène is a friend. His texts, between melancholy and sensuality, suffering and abandonment, move me. His voice, half of this world, half from elsewhere, is astonishing, it is the voice of a fallen angel. Mylène is one of the most beautiful women I have ever met.“, said the novelist in 1999 to the magazine vogue. A beautiful friendship that makes the interpreter of Without counterfeit, Libertine, XXL or The words will even find herself invited to the wedding of the author with Padma Lakshmi in 2004.
The singer is not the only personality shocked by the terrible aggression experienced by Salman Rushdie, threatened with death since the 1980s. The actress Isabelle Adjani also reacted, she who had taken the risk of reading an extract from satanic verses on the stage of the Cesars, in 1989, when a fatwa had been launched against the novelist…