CONTENT WARNING: This story discusses drug addiction and mental health issues. Support services are listed below.
An addict, a trusted assistant, an A-list fixer, a “ketamine queen”, two doctors, a $55,000 drugs bill and a lethal injection: Keiran Southern untangles the last dark hours of the Friends actor’s life.
More than a century ago Dr Hubert Eaton, founder of Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks, lamented that cemeteries had become “unsightly stoneyards full of inartistic symbols and depressing customs”. He vowed that his would be places of beauty resembling “God’s garden”. The results of Eaton’s vision are dotted around southern California – filled with gleaming chapels and statues around well-kept lawns.
Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills is no exception. The vast park on the slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains might have as many celebrities per acre as some of the city’s wealthiest postcodes. Bette Davis shares a sarcophagus here with her mother and sister. Liberace’s grave is marked with a doodle of a piano, while Stan Laurel has a modest plot, thousands of miles from his birthplace of Ulverston in Cumbria.
In November 2023 another star was laid to rest at Forest Lawn. Less than a week after his death from what an autopsy report described as “the acute effects of ketamine”, Matthew Perry’s loved ones gathered at a church in the cemetery to say their final goodbyes. The 54-year-old’s casket was placed within the white walls of a corridor called the Sanctuary of Treasured Love, in Forest Lawn’s Courts of Remembrance.
A mile from the studio where they filmed the television show that made them world famous and fabulously wealthy, Perry’s Friends co-stars were together again. It was a reunion that had occurred only a handful of times since the era-defining sitcom aired its last episode in 2004. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc joined Perry’s parents, siblings, management team and childhood friends at the private ceremony.
Among them was a man who was not famous — at the time, at least. Kenneth Iwamasa was Perry’s live-in assistant and he appeared just as devastated as they were. His grief may have been genuine but the 60-year-old was also hiding a secret.
On the morning of Perry’s death, Iwamasa had injected him with substantial quantities of ketamine, a procedure he had been performing for weeks despite having no medical training. He had handed over thousands of dollars of Perry’s money to drug dealers and allegedly crooked doctors for ketamine — a powerful sedative and a controlled substance in the US — while knowing his boss had fought a decades-long battle with addiction. It was Iwamasa who, on the afternoon of Saturday, October 28, 2023, found Perry floating face down in the hot tub at his home in the Pacific Palisades overlooking the ocean.
Iwamasa’s secret would not be kept indefinitely. In August last year he was one of five people charged in relation to Perry’s death. He and two others — Erik Fleming, 55, a former film director turned Hollywood fixer, and a doctor, Mark Chavez, 54, admitted conspiracy to distribute ketamine. The two defendants who are protesting their innocence — Dr Salvador Plasencia, 43, and Jasveen Sangha, 41, an alleged drug dealer to the stars — are due to go before a jury in August, accused of distributing ketamine among other charges. The indictment alleges that Sangha’s distribution of ketamine caused Perry’s death.
The case has pulled back the curtain on the shady networks that prey on the vulnerabilities of the rich and famous. Sangha is alleged to be a prominent figure in the Hollywood underworld, to whom Los Angeles prosecutors referred in the indictment as “the Ketamine Queen”. A dual British and American citizen, who was born in Britain and carries a British passport, she is alleged to have been a go-to dealer for high-profile clients, renowned not only for the quality of her product but for her discretion. Sangha is in jail awaiting the trial.
In the immediate aftermath of Perry’s death, those who saw him in his final weeks said he had been in good spirits and sober. Then, after a coroner revealed drugs had been involved, silence took hold. Some of those closest to Perry, however, cannot leave certain things unsaid. His best friend, Chris Murray, 54, a successful Canadian property developer based in London, places much of the blame on the entertainment industry machine, and over Zoom unleashed his anger to me at those he feels let down the actor. More than a year after his death, as Perry’s final resting place lies without a nameplate in Los Angeles, Murray wonders if the actor will ever be free of Hollywood.
Meanwhile, Perry’s half-sister, Caitlin Morrison, 43, has dedicated herself to ensuring his legacy is one of hope rather than despair. She lives in the town of Barrie, Ontario, and is executive director of the Matthew Perry Foundation of Canada. “I think about him every day,” she tells me.
‘This disease’
The backyard of 18038 Blue Sail Drive in the Pacific Palisades offered some of the finest views in southern California. Perry bought the four-bedroom, mid-century property in the exclusive neighbourhood of Los Angeles for $6 million in 2020. From the deck a viewer could watch surfers in the waves below. Perry valued the seclusion. It was more peaceful than touristy Santa Monica, a 20-minute drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, and less flashy than Malibu, a short drive in the other direction. The house survived the recent wildfires.
Handsome and funny, Perry was earning more than $1 million an episode at the peak of Friends’ popularity, playing Chandler Bing, a wisecracking data analyst who used humour to mask his insecurities. He found inspiration for the role just by looking in the mirror. About three weeks before he had auditioned for Friends, he had dropped to his knees in his tiny apartment near Sunset Boulevard and appealed to the Almighty: “God, you can do whatever you want to me. Just please make me famous.”
His prayer had a Faustian twist. Friends premiered in September 1994 and was an instant hit, making Perry and his co-stars superstars. Yet throughout his adult life Perry was crippled by an overwhelming addiction, destroying his body with alcohol and prescription painkillers before he eventually moved on to ketamine.
In his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, the author wrote of downing bottles of vodka and filming the sitcom through debilitating hangovers. Then there were the pills. At his worst he was taking 55 tablets of the powerful opioid Vicodin each day, a Herculean logistical challenge that involved lying to multiple doctors to get hold of the drugs.
Perry’s weight fluctuated between seasons and he could tell by his appearance on Friends which substance he was abusing at the time. “When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol; when I’m skinny, it’s pills. When I have a goatee, it’s lots of pills,” he wrote. He detailed how he nearly died in 2018 after his colon burst due to his substance abuse.
In 2022, after more than a dozen stints in rehab and spending $9 million to get clean, Perry revealed his anger at the price he had paid for success. “It’s not fair that I had to go through this disease while the other five didn’t,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, choking back tears. “They got everything that I got. But I had to fight this thing and still have to fight this thing.”
He was painfully lonely. He dated a series of beautiful women yet, haunted by a fear of abandonment, never married. His previous partners include the model and actress Yasmine Bleeth and Julia Roberts, with whom he broke up in 1996 after fearing she would leave him. “Why would she not?” he wrote in his book. “I was broken, bent, unlovable.” Perry watched Roberts win the best actress Oscar for Erin Brockovich in 2001 while detoxing at a rehab facility. He provoked laughter in the room by joking at the television, “I’ll take you back.” He was engaged to the literary manager Molly Hurwitz in November 2020 but ended the relationship the following June.
When the cast of Friends reunited for a TV special in 2021, Perry’s appearance alarmed fans. He was sober at the time but his speech was slurred. His death two years later came after he had again relapsed. Perry became addicted to ketamine after receiving it intravenously in a clinical setting for anxiety and depression. He went on to seek it out illegally. He died alone having been injected with ketamine by someone he paid to live with him.
‘I felt for the guy’
Perry was born in 1969 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to John Bennett Perry, an American singer and aspiring actor, now 84, and Suzanne Langford, a Canadian beauty queen, now 77. His parents split up when he was nine months old — their last trip as a family unit was a five-and-a-half-hour drive to the Canadian border. The elder Perry dropped off his wife and son before leaving them to pursue a career in Hollywood.
Langford became famous in Canada as the press secretary to Pierre Trudeau, the country’s debonair prime minister. Perry claimed to have beaten up his son, Justin Trudeau, while they attended an exclusive primary school together. “I’m not bragging about this,” he said on a chat show in 2017. “It was terrible, I was a stupid kid.”
Perry described feeling abandoned during a childhood mostly spent in Ottawa, where he was a promising tennis player. There were already signs of the problems to come. His first drink of alcohol was at 14 when hanging out with his best friends, the brothers Chris and Brian Murray. They had met at school in Ottawa and bonded over their shared sense of humour. It was with the Murrays that Perry developed Chandler’s distinctive way of speaking — “Could she be any hotter?” He called it the Murray-Perry cadence.
The night of that first drink does not stick in Chris’s mind, instead fading into a haze of general teenage high jinks, but for Perry it was seminal. “For the first time in my life, nothing bothered me,” Perry later recalled of lying on the grass in his backyard having drunk a bottle of white wine. The Murrays had thrown up, according to Perry’s telling, while he was “complete, at peace. I had never been happier than in that moment.”
Aged 15 Perry joined his father in Los Angeles, breaking his mother’s heart in the process. Langford had married Keith Morrison, a correspondent for Dateline NBC, a weekly news show. They had started a family of their own and Perry felt left out.
The Murrays remained Perry’s closest friends. The actor was godfather to Chris Murray’s 21-year-old daughter when he died. The summer before his death he joined the brothers on a trip to France, where they indulged in their shared love of tennis, attending the French Open in Paris before heading to the Riviera. Perry’s assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, was also there.
“That prick,” Chris says in disgust. At the time of his death Perry had been considering moving back to Ottawa, where he had spent his final Christmas. He’d even taken virtual tours of homes in the Canadian capital — to the delight of Chris, who had pleaded with him for years to leave Los Angeles.
Chris was among the speakers at Perry’s funeral. The following day the brothers went to his house in the Pacific Palisades because “we were concerned about Kenny”. “They were really close,” Murray says of Iwamasa and Perry. He believed the live-in assistant to be “odd” but had no idea the role he had played in Perry’s death. “I felt for the guy, about what he was going to do afterwards,” Chris says. “Obviously, he was out of a job. I was caring because Matthew would say, ‘He’s one of the good guys.’ If I had any f***ing idea he was slipping him stuff I just didn’t.”
‘How much will this moron pay?’
In August last year federal prosecutors in Los Angeles unsealed an indictment that reverberated around Hollywood. Five people had been charged with drug offences in relation to Perry’s death. Prosecutors told a story of a vulnerable addict being preyed upon by people supposed to help him.
Iwamasa, a short, bespectacled man with wispy grey hair, was a veteran showbusiness assistant originally from Michigan. His LinkedIn page said he had worked for Perry for 25 years and boasted: “I am discreet, loyal and honor absolute confidentiality.” Among his responsibilities was co-ordinating Perry’s medical appointments and ensuring he took his legally prescribed medicine — not including ketamine.
Perry had undergone legitimate ketamine therapy to treat his depression and anxiety, receiving intravenous doses of the drug at a local clinic overseen by doctors. However, according to prosecutors he became addicted to the drug and asked for an increased dosage — a request that was denied. The medical examiner’s report sheds further light on Perry’s treatment.
A witness whose name is redacted told investigators that Perry’s previous doctor had been giving him ketamine as often as every other day, but his new physician of six months believed his depression was “fine”, so he “did not need more treatments”. His last known clinically administered dose of ketamine was a week and a half before his death. Unable to go without the drug, Perry turned to illegitimate means.
It is alleged that in September 2023 Iwamasa was asked by Perry to help him obtain ketamine and did so through Dr Plasencia — aged 42 at the time the charges were unveiled — who operated a clinic in Calabasas. Plasencia, it is alleged, sourced the drug from Dr Chavez, who had previously run a ketamine clinic.
“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia allegedly texted Chavez, referring to Perry. The answer was a lot. Prosecutors say Iwamasa met Plasencia at least seven times between September 30 and October 28, paying him $55,000 of Perry’s money for ketamine in liquid and lozenge form.
Sometimes, Perry appeared to be so desperate for his next fix that he would join his assistant to obtain the drugs. Iwamasa drove him to a public car park near an aquarium in Long Beach on October 10 where they met Plasencia, who climbed into the back seat with Perry and injected him with a shot of ketamine. Plasencia allegedly instructed Iwamasa how to inject Perry. On one occasion Perry suffered an adverse reaction to the drug, leading Plasencia to allegedly remark, “Let’s not do that again.” Despite the huge sums being spent, Perry’s growing addiction meant Iwamasa sought another illicit source.
The ‘Ketamine Queen’
Jasveen Sangha’s life was, according to her Instagram page, the sort of glamorous existence that outsiders might believe is commonplace in southern California. The 41-year-old was regularly pictured draped in designer clothing from high-end brands: Gucci top, Fendi jacket, Louis Vuitton shoes. She had grown up in the UK, born in Essex in 1983. Her mother, Nilem, was from Ilford, east London, the daughter of a hosiery wholesaler. Sangha was the product of Nilem’s first marriage of three — her father was a doctor. Nilem took Sangha to live in California, where she graduated at Calabasas High School before studying at the University of California, Irvine. Sangha briefly returned to Britain in 2010 to study for an MBA at the Hult International Business School in London before returning to Los Angeles.
From her home in north Hollywood she curated art shows in LA and attended parties around the world where she was pictured with celebrities including Charlie Sheen and DJ Khaled. For her 40th birthday in 2023 she celebrated with a lavish party at Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, a bar at the boutique Line Hotel in the Koreatown neighbourhood that combines disco with a Gatsby-era theme. She dressed in a feathery ensemble featuring a cane and cowboy-style hat. In November 2023, a few weeks after Perry was found dead, Sangha was drinking tea at a five-star hotel in Tokyo. From her room she had views of Mount Fuji and posed in a flowery kimono.
Prosecutors say that her jet-setting lifestyle was funded by a “drug-selling emporium” and Sangha had another identity, that of the “Ketamine Queen”. Sangha, it is alleged, was running a “stash house” where she dealt drugs to the rich and famous, earning a reputation among the Hollywood elite as a trusted supplier of methamphetamine, psilocybin mushrooms, cocaine and prescription drugs.
The link between Perry and the “Ketamine Queen” is alleged to be Erik Fleming, a former film-maker who directed the 1999 children’s comedy My Brother the Pig, featuring a young Scarlett Johansson. Fleming had a promising career but at some point it unravelled and he became a middleman for drug dealers.
Fleming had heard through a mutual friend that Perry was looking for ketamine and got in touch on October 4, 2023, according to his plea agreement. On October 10 Iwamasa was looking for additional sources of the drug to feed his boss’s spiralling addiction. “She only deal[s] with high end and celebs,” Fleming allegedly texted Iwamasa on October 11. “If it were not great stuff she’d lose her business.”
Prices were discussed over text, as well as a $1000 brokering fee for Fleming. He promised Iwamasa that Sangha could deliver whatever was wanted and replied: “As of now she said she can fill any order.”
Iwamasa paid Fleming $6000 for 25 vials of ketamine. Five days before Perry died, Fleming was at the actor’s house and picked up another $6000. He delivered 25 vials to Perry’s Palisades home at about 10.52pm on October 24. This is the ketamine that prosecutors allege killed Perry.
‘Shoot me up with a big one’
At about 8.30am on October 28, 2023, Perry asked Iwamasa to inject him with a dose of ketamine. At about 11am, Perry played pickleball at his local country club. He had become a keen player of the racket sport and according to his coach was using it to help his recovery.
He returned home by 12.45pm and asked Iwamasa to administer more ketamine while he watched a movie, according to the assistant’s plea agreement. About 40 minutes later Perry asked Iwamasa to prepare the hot tub and told him to “shoot me up with a big one”. The assistant filled a syringe and injected Perry while he was “in or near” the heated portion of his pool. Perry would spend his evenings there, a few feet from a red-lighted “bat signal” he had installed on the pool floor. He had an enduring fascination with Batman and had a haul of Caped Crusader memorabilia.
After injecting the third dose of ketamine, Iwamasa left to run errands. He returned at 4pm to find Perry face down in the pool, according to the medical examiner’s report. After lifting him onto the steps, he called paramedics. The emergency services arrived within minutes and pulled Perry onto the grass, where he was pronounced dead at 4.17pm.
In the immediate aftermath, Iwamasa cleared away the incriminating evidence including empty ketamine bottles and syringes, according to court records. The medical examiner’s report states that there was no illegal drug paraphernalia found at the house, only prescribed medicine, over-the-counter products, nicotine vapes and lollipops. Used ashtrays were placed around the property. Perry had recently been trying to give up smoking.
Perry’s body was placed on a stretcher and loaded into a white coroner’s van after 1am on Sunday, October 29. The vehicle drove slowly from his home down a hill to a crowd of photographers and television reporters waiting in the dark behind a yellow police cordon. Camera flashes illuminated the street. After Perry’s body left the scene his mother, Suzanne, followed with her husband, Morrison, at the wheel of a white Tesla. Suzanne was in the passenger seat, her head bowed.
‘Delete all our messages’
When the news of Perry’s death broke on the evening of October 28, the network of dealers who supplied the drugs immediately tried to cover their tracks, it is alleged. Prosecutors say Fleming used the Signal encrypted messaging app to discuss deleting evidence. Sangha is said to have updated the settings on her app to automatically wipe messages with Fleming and instructed him to “delete all our messages”. “Yes,” Fleming replied, according to a screenshot included in charging documents.
They continued to communicate, however. “Please call Got more info and want to bounce ideas off you,” Fleming wrote on October 30. “I’m 90% sure everyone is protected. I never dealt with [Perry]. Only his Assistant. So the Assistant was the enabler. Also they are doing a 3 month tox screening Does K stay in your system or is it immediately flushed out[?]”
Sangha was arrested on drugs charges in March last year and released on bail. However, in August federal prosecutors brought a new indictment accusing her of being implicated in Perry’s death and her bail was revoked ahead of a trial.
Sangha has pleaded not guilty to various charges, including distribution of ketamine resulting in death. She is alleged to have been dealing drugs for years and was linked to another ketamine-related death in 2019. Her mother secured the $100,000 bond following her initial arrest but could not be contacted for comment. Sangha, whose lawyer has also been contacted, was last seen publicly during a court appearance in August. A sketch artist showed her shackled, wearing a bright green Nirvana sweatshirt in place of the designer clothes she was used to.
A legacy
Perry had wanted to spend the rest of his life helping other addicts, especially those without his financial means. “The best thing about me, bar none, is that if somebody comes to me and says, ‘I can’t stop drinking, can you help me?’ I can say yes and follow up and do it,” he told a podcast in 2022. “When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned. I want that to be the first thing that’s mentioned. And I’m gonna live the rest of my life proving that.”
Days after he was found dead, a foundation was established in his name. The Matthew Perry Foundation, based in Los Angeles, was “the realisation of Matthew’s enduring commitment to helping others struggling with the disease of addiction”, a statement announcing its creation read. It is run by Doug Chapin, Perry’s former manager, and Lisa Kasteler-Calio, his former publicist.
Almost a year after the actor’s death, another Matthew Perry Foundation was set up, based in Canada, where he grew up, and run by his family and close friends. Kudrow, Perry’s Friends co-star, is an ambassador, as is the actor Hank Azaria, known for voicing characters on The Simpsons, and the Friends co-creator David Crane.
The actor’s loved ones wanted to continue his work with treatment and the organisation is run by Caitlin Morrison, Perry’s half-sister, the daughter of Suzanne Langford and Keith Morrison. Speaking over Zoom from Barrie, she describes the foundation’s approach as “on the ground”, sending direct help to addicts who often find themselves struggling alone after treatment. The foundation will support an individual for years, with everything from housing costs to counselling and help finding employment.
The first Matthew Perry House will be built in Ottawa and is due to open in 2027. A community residence for post-treatment, it will consist of several apartment buildings and a main centre connecting them. The property will serve as a one-stop shop for those in recovery, including mental health treatment and job support. The foundation has another ambitious goal: Morrison is looking for a mid-sized Canadian town of about 50,000 people, where they will offer help to every single addict with services similar to the Matthew Perry House.
Morrison is driven by grief for her half-brother. Perry was more than a decade her senior and she idolised him as a child, recalling sitting starry-eyed while watching him perform at the family home in Canada.
“I think about him every day,” Morrison says. “I think everyone who knew him does. He was brilliant and extraordinary, a central part of everybody’s life. I think about him in terms of what he would do in every situation when it comes to decisions that are being made about the organisation. Because I am fuelled by a desire to continue the work he was doing in the way he would do it, and then spare other people from all the devastation that comes with losing someone.”
A grave with no name
The Courts of Remembrance at Forest Lawn is one of the most visited sites at the cemetery, where towering stone walls surround lawned courtyards. It is here that Bette Davis is buried, a short walk from Liberace and Rod Steiger. In one courtyard Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher, the mother and daughter actresses who died within a day of each other in 2016, are laid to rest in a giant sarcophagus.
Around the corner, beneath the crypts of an avian biologist and a medical scientist, lies the unmarked final resting place of Matthew Perry. There is no nameplate to signify that one of the most famous television stars of all time is laid to rest here, only a few wilted flowers. It did not remain under wraps for long, however, and the Hollywood news website TMZ reported the location shortly after the funeral. Some fans had stuck Batman stickers on the wall as a tribute to Perry’s “Mattman” persona, which have since been removed. The subdued nature of the plot does not sit well with Chris Murray. He was also angered by the memorial service.
“I’m not saying have a big funeral, at least have a religious funeral,” he says. “Have something that’s not Hollywood. Have something that has spiritual meaning. Have something where he’s laid to rest, where he has a tombstone or something nice that you can visit, rather than what looks like a drawer at a morgue, in some faithless and faceless resting place.” The presence of Iwamasa at the funeral rubbed salt into the wounds. Murray would like to bring Perry to Canada, posthumously saving him from an industry he views as predatory.
Sangha and Plasencia were due to stand trial in downtown Los Angeles next month. However, their lawyers asked for more time to prepare their defence and a judge agreed, pushing the joint trial to August 19. Iwamasa is scheduled to be sentenced in May, Chavez and Fleming in April. Legal experts suggest the defendants may argue that the case is an accidental death for which they are not directly responsible. They might argue Perry was responsible for the drugs he took and so effectively caused his own death. The actor spent a lifetime fighting an addiction he could not control. “Just because it’s a tragedy doesn’t mean it’s criminal,” Mark Geragos, whose firm is representing Sangha, said last year.
That outcome is intolerable for Murray. “Who’s got Matt’s back?” he asks.
Written by: Keiran Southern
© The Times of London
Drug addiction: Where to get help
- The Level: A straight-up guide for people who use drugs. thelevel.org.nz
- High Alert: A network of health professionals and social services highalert.org.nz/about-us
- Alcohol Drug Helpline: 0800 787 797 or text 8681
- Meth helpline: 0800 METH HELP (0800 6384 4357)