Matthew Perry’s live-in assistant, two doctors and a woman dubbed the “ketamine queen” are among the five peopleindicted and charged in the investigation into the actor’s death, which unearthed a “broad underground criminal network,” a coalition of law enforcement agencies announced at a press conference in L.A. on Thursday.
Jasveen Sangha, the 41-year-old woman prosecutors refer to as “the ketamine queen,” and Salvador Plasencia, also known as “Dr. P.,” who worked as a physician at an urgent care center, are the lead defendants in the case. Sangha is accused of maintaining a “stash house” in North Hollywood where thousands of dollars worth of illegal drugs were discovered when a warrant was executed there in March, according to a superseding indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The two are charged with conspiracy to distribute ketamine, distribution of ketamine resulting in death, possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, altering and falsifying records related to a federal investigation and other charges. Both were arrested and taken into custody Thursday morning, according to authorities.
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The Friends star’s assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, along with Erik Fleming, who has been described as a friend of Perry’s and a street drug dealer, and another doctor, Mark Chavez, have accepted lower charges during court dates in August. Plasencia was working with Dr. Chavez to obtain ketamine, which he would then provide to Iwamasa, who would then inject the ketamine into Perry. From September 2023 until his Oct. 28, 2023 death, the three worked to distribute approximately 20 vials of ketamine to Perry for $55,000, authorities said on Thursday.
“These defendants took advantage of Mr. Perry’s addiction issues to enrich themselves. They knew what they were doing was wrong,” Estrada said at a Thursday press conference. “They knew what they were doing was risking great danger to Mr. Perry, but they did it anyway. In the end, these defendants were more interested in profiting.”
Estrada said that over two weeks in October, Sangha is alleged to have sold approximately 50 vials of ketamine for around $11,000 in cash. She worked with Fleming and Perry’s assistant to distribute the ketamine. Authorities searching the phones belonging to all of the defendants found text messages using encrypted apps, including Signal, that detailed the network they’d developed that led to Perry’s death.
The criminal probe launched in May included investigators with the Los Angeles Police Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Postal Service. Detectives indicated they were tracing the actor’s procurement of the illegal drug, which has been used recreationally for decades but has recently been discovered as broadly useful in the treatment of depression.
Perry’s body was found by an assistant after he had drowned in his swimming pool’s hot tub at his Pacific Palisades home on Oct. 28, 2023 after the lethal dose of ketamine caused him to have cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s office. The amount of ketamine found in his blood was about the same as what would be used during general anesthesia, the medical examiner said. The office lists the acute effects of the drug as the main cause of his death and added drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of buprenorphine, a drug used to treat opioid use, as contributing factors.
Estrada said on Thursday that it was Sangha who sold the batch of ketamine that resulted in Perry’s death. According to the indictment against her, officers searched her L.A. home and found what amounted to a “drug-selling emporium” there. The search turned up 80 vials of ketamine, 1,000 pills containing methamphetamine, cocaine and bottles of Xanax and other illegally obtained prescription drugs, he told reporters. A ledger of names and weights was also found in her home, Estrada added.
The DEA has also filed a drug distribution charge related to the death of Cody McClellan, a 33-year-old who died after being sold the deadly narcotic by Sangha in 2019. Yet she continued to distribute massive amounts of a variety of illegal drugs, despite this tragedy, Estrada noted at the press conference.
The defendants are alleged to have attempted to cover up what they had done after reading news reports of Perry’s death. After Perry’s death, Plasencia allegedly falsified medical records and notes to legitimize his practices concerning the star.
Fleming, 54, pleaded guilty last Thursday to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death; he admitted in court documents that he distributed the lethal ketamine dose from Sangha and distributed 50 vials of ketamine to Iwamasa.
Iwamasa, 59, pleaded guilty on Aug. 7 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death. He admitted to the court that he repeatedly injected Perry with the drug and had no medical training other than instructions given to him by Dr. Plasencia; he performed multiple injections on Perry on the day the actor died.
Chavez, 54, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine. In his plea deal, he admits to selling ketamine to Plasencia, including some diverted from a ketamine clinic he had owned. He also made false representations to a wholesale ketamine distributor and used a phony prescription for ketamine losenges using the name of a former patient.
After his death, friends confirmed that Perry was undergoing ketamine therapy. However, the actor’s most recent session had been a week and a half before his death, according to the medical examiner’s report. No other drugs were found in Perry’s system, and there was no paraphernalia discovered in his home, officials said.
In his memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry wrote about undergoing ketamine therapy. “I often thought that I was dying during that hour,” he said. “Oh, I thought, this is what happens when you die. Yet I would continually sign up for this sh*t because it was something different, and anything different is good.”
He added, “Taking K is like being hit in the head with a giant happy shovel. But the hangover was rough and outweighed the shovel. Ketamine was not for me.”
Perry had been open about his decades-long struggles with addiction to alcohol and opioids, recalling in his 2022 memoir how, at the height of his addiction, which was during his later years on the classic NBC sitcom, he was taking 55 Vicodin pills a day.
According to the medical examiner’s report after his death, a psychiatrist and an anesthesiologist who also served as Perry’s primary care physician were the medical professionals known to be treating Perry in October. Neither were named in the indictments released on Thursday.
This story was first published on Aug. 15 at 7:37 a.m.
