A woman known as the “ketamine queen”, charged with selling Matthew Perry the drug that killed him, agreed to plead guilty on Monday.
Jasveen Sangha became the fifth and final defendant charged in the overdose death of the Friends star to strike a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. Having initially pleaded not guilty, her change of plea means she will avoid a trial that had been planned for August.
Prosecutors had cast Sangha as a prolific drug dealer who was known to her customers as the “ketamine queen”, using the term often in press releases and court documents and even including it in the official name of the case.
A federal indictment charged Sangha with one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine, one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, one count of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, one count of possession with intent to distribute ketamine and five counts of distribution of ketamine.
Sangha will officially change her plea to guilty at an upcoming hearing, where sentencing will be scheduled, prosecutors said. She could get up to 45 years in prison. An email sent to Sangha’s lawyers seeking comment was not immediately answered.
Sangha was indicted in June, and she – along with four other defendants, including Perry’s personal assistant and two doctors – was arrested in August. She and Dr Salvador Plasencia were charged with conspiracy to distribute ketamine, distribution of ketamine resulting in death, possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, and altering and falsifying records related to a federal investigation.
She and Plasencia, who signed his own plea deal on 16 June, were the primary targets of the investigation. Three other defendants – Dr Mark Chavez, Kenneth Iwamasa and Erik Fleming – agreed to plead guilty last year in exchange for their cooperation, which included statements implicating the pair.
Perry was found dead in his Los Angeles home by Iwamasa, his assistant, on 28 October 2023. The medical examiner ruled that ketamine, typically used as a surgical anesthetic, was the primary cause of death.
The actor had been using the drug through his regular doctor as a legal, but off-label, treatment for depression, which has become increasingly common. Perry, 54, sought more ketamine than his doctor would give him. He began getting it from Plasencia about a month before his death, then started getting still more from Sangha about two weeks before his death, prosecutors said.
Perry and Iwamasa found Sangha through Perry’s friend Fleming. In their plea agreements, both men described the subsequent deals in detail.
Fleming messaged Iwamasa saying Sangha’s ketamine was “unmarked but it’s amazing”, according to court documents. Fleming texted Iwamasa that she only deals “with high end and celebs. If it were not great stuff she’d lose her business.”
With the two men acting as middlemen, Perry bought large amounts of ketamine from Sangha, including 25 vials for $6,000 in cash four days before his death. That purchase included the doses that killed Perry, prosecutors said.
On the day of Perry’s death, Sangha told Fleming they should delete all the messages they had sent each other, according to her indictment.
Her home in North Hollywood, California, was raided in March 2024 by Drug Enforcement Administration agents who found large amounts of methamphetamines and ketamine, according to an affidavit from an agent.
None of the defendants has yet been sentenced.
Perry struggled with addiction for years, dating back to his time on Friends, when he became one of the biggest stars of his generation as Chandler Bing. He starred alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 on NBC’s hit series.
In his memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, released in 2022, Perry wrote about how he became an alcoholic as a teenager and developed an addiction to pain medication following a 1997 jet skiing accident. His addictions took a major toll on his life, Perry wrote, at one point putting him in a coma and costing him about $7m to get sober.
After his death, a foundation was set up in his name to help those struggling with addiction.
