Salman Rushdie's Dating History: From Padma Lakshmi to Rachel Eliza Griffiths

After divorcing Padma Lakshmi in 2007, Salman Rushdie married his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths in 2021

Author Salman Rushdie has been in several high-profile relationships with fellow writers and celebrities.

Rushdie’s dating life has included five marriages to Clarissa Luard, Marianne Wiggins, Elizabeth West, Padma Lakshmi and Rachel Eliza Griffiths. He has two sons, Zafar with Luard and Milan with West.

Due to his controversial writing, including being condemned to death for his book The Satanic Verses, Rushdie was attacked while speaking at a literary festival in 2022.

Griffiths has nursed him back to health ever since, and in 2023 she told The Guardian, “I feel relieved he does not have access to the memories I do. I’m holding those as best I can and trying to come forward, we are both trying to come forward.”

A year after Griffiths opened up about their relationship and the attack on Rushdie, the author reflected on his healing journey. Rushdie's April 2024 book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, includes details about how Griffiths supported Rushdie after the assault.

Here is everything to know about Salman Rushdie’s dating history.

Clarissa Luard

Rushdie and Luard met at a concert in 1969 and were in a relationship until they married in 1976. They welcomed their only child together, a son named Zafar, in 1979. Less than 10 years later, in 1987, Rushdie and Luard got divorced.

Two years after their split, the supreme leader of Iran at the time, Ayatollah Khomeini, ordered Rushdie's execution. Despite the fact that Luard and Rushdie were no longer together, she lived under strict security measures for years, per The Guardian.

Luard died in 1999 of cancer. Her obituary noted that although they divorced in 1987, she and Rushdie were in contact up until her death.

Robyn Davidson

Rushdie and the Australian writer Davidson met and began an affair in 1984. The New Yorker reported that the author separated from Luard the following year and Rushdie and Davidson's relationship ended around the same time as their divorce.

Decades later, in 2014, Davidson told The Sydney Morning Herald that the pair were unexpectedly reunited at the Telluride Film Festival the year prior.

Perhaps due to what she described as a “terrible, absolutely f------ terrible" end to their relationship, Davidson said, “we looked across the room and met each other's eyes. It was very odd.”

“I'm always very conscious of being watched, and I'm sure he is, too, and he was with his new squeeze,” she added. In the same interview, Davidson warned against having a famous partner because “It’s too complicated.”

Marianne Wiggins

Wiggins and Rushdie married in 1988. The pair were hit with the unthinkable a year later when Rushdie was condemned to death by Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of his book The Satanic Verses.

The news came on Feb. 14, 1989, as the couple were celebrating Valentine's Day and the publication of Wiggins’ book. As she told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, they were planning a joint book tour when they found out they would need to leave their home in London nearly immediately.

Wiggins explained, “You never really expect anything to happen the way it does. But here’s how it happens. At 10:30 in the morning, your husband comes running down the stairs because he’s just been called by the BBC. And he tells you that he’s been condemned to death by Iran.” She and Rushdie were hidden by the British government for 5 months when they decided together that Wiggins should attempt to resume her life outside.

After Rushdie and Wiggins' separation, which occurred while they were in exile, the two communicated sporadically by phone calls, which she described as “more painful than pleasurable." They divorced in 1993.

Elizabeth West

Rushdie married West in 1997. When he published his autobiography, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, in 2012, Rushdie opened up about his relationship with West and how it overlapped with his exile.

In an excerpt published by The Sydney Morning Herald, Rushdie revisited 1999, when he and West had been married for two years and had welcomed their son Milan.

The author also met his fourth wife, Lakshmi, during the same time period. After Rushdie ended his marriage to pursue Lakshmi, he wrote that West told him, “You saw an illusion and you destroyed your family for it.”

The Man Booker Prize winner also detailed other problems between himself and West: she wanted more children and he didn’t, and they were both stressed by living with the threat of his seemingly imminent death.

Rushdie began an affair with Lakshmi that inevitably caused damage to West, he wrote, and “It was clear to him at the time and afterwards that these months of vacillation inflicted greater pain on Elizabeth than anything else.”

Rushdie and West divorced in 2004.

Padma Lakshmi

Rushdie and Lakshmi met while he was married to West and began an affair that would ultimately turn into a relationship that spanned eight years, three of which they spent married.

In Joseph Anton, the author referred to Lakshmi as an “illusion” and wrote that beginning a relationship with her not only destroyed his family with West, it also “place an unfair burden upon the Illusion herself, an American of Indian origin who had grand ambitions and secret plans that had nothing to do with the fulfillment of his deepest needs.”

Rushdie and Lakshmi began living together in 2000, four years before his divorce from West was finalized. In 2016, Lakshmi told PEOPLE, “For us Indians, he's [Rushdie's] like Hemingway. Imagine a young woman in her twenties, who loves books and who had published her little cookbook and in comes this guy. I mean, he was the best thing that ever happened to me by a mile.”

The pair married in 2004 and got divorced three years later. According to Lakshmi, their relationship ended because she wanted to build her own career outside of their relationship, and her then-undiagnosed endometriosis often left her in pain and unable to have sex.

She explained that Rushdie felt "rejected" and said, “Endometriosis was definitely a major reason that my marriage failed and I don't think either of us understood it at the time."

Lakshmi also added that she and Rushdie remained friends after their split and that she gave him a warning before starting to talk about their relationship publicly.

"I do talk about intimate things and I think that's going to perhaps be difficult for him but I tried to be even-handed about explaining the wonderful years that I had with Salman too," she said. "Because I do still love him. In many ways, I consider him still part of my family."

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Rushdie married poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths in 2021. She told The Guardian in 2023 that the two met in 2016 at a literary event and Rushdie ordered all five of her poetry books “right away.”

Griffiths has opened up about their romance and her fear after Rushdie was attacked in 2022. Throughout his healing process, she has been there to support him.

The poet told Harper’s Bazaar that being able to talk about their work is special for both she and Rushdie. Griffiths explained, “He’s so respectful of my writing. He’ll just say, 'whenever you have something to look at, I would be happy to look at it.' "

She continued, "It’s wonderful to have a spouse who’s excited about what you do; it infuses your own ecosystem, and your own excitement about your craft. It’s a very sacred space, when two artists can work together that way."

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People.