Ten days before Matthew Perry was found dead of an apparent drowning in his hot tub, Dr Salvador Plasencia visited his home in the upmarket Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Perry – star of TV phenomenon Friends – had long struggled with addiction as his millions of fans knew but Dr P, as Plasencia was known to patients, ignored this and injected the 54-year-old with a large dose of ketamine.
The treatment caused Perry’s body to ‘freeze’ and sent his blood pressure spiking alarmingly, prosecutors alleged this week. ‘Let’s not do that again,’ the doctor is said to have told Perry’s live-in assistant Kenneth Iwamasa after the medical emergency was over.
Nonetheless, the doctor left behind vials of the powerful surgical anaesthetic to be administered by Perry’s aide without medical supervision, it is claimed, and in the days leading up to the star’s death he was given between three and six shots of ketamine a day including the one that led to his death in October last year.
Plasencia and Iwamasa are among five people, including another doctor, charged with conspiracy to distribute the ketamine that contributed to the actor’s death.
Matthew Perry was pictured out in LA with personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa exactly two months before his death. Iwasama is charged with injecting the Friends star with dozens of doses of ketamine, including the one that killed him
Jasveen Sangha – known in her North Hollywood neighbourhood as the Ketamine Queen – has also been charged with distribution of ketamine
Doctor Salvador Plasencia, 42, has also been charged with conspiracy to distribute ketamine
Perry, a talented comic actor, became addicted to alcohol at a young age and his addiction struggles were evident when he was starring in Friends, the hugely popular 90s series about a group of six friends living in New York
All face maximum sentences ranging from ten years to life in prison.
‘The defendants in this case knew what they were doing was wrong,’ Martin Estrada, US Attorney for the Central District of California, said at a news 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 off Mr Perry than caring for his well-being.’
It is hard to imagine a sadder and more sordid end to the beloved actor’s life, and the full scale of the ruthless exploitation and betrayal of Perry by people meant to protect him must be a bitter blow to his family, friends and fans. ‘We were and still are heartbroken by Matthew’s death but it has helped to know law enforcement has taken this case very seriously,’ the actor’s stepfather Keith Morrison, married to Perry’s mother Suzanne, said in a statement.
Perry, a talented comic actor, became addicted to alcohol at a young age and his addiction struggles were evident when he was starring in Friends, the hugely popular 90s series about a group of six friends living in New York.
H is co-star Jennifer Aniston was one of many people who tried to intervene and help, without success.
Alleged drug dealer Jasveen Sangha has not been shy about flaunting her flashy lifestyle
Sangha, 41, is accused of supplying the ketamine which killed actor Matthew Perry in October 2023. She is pictured here on a trip to Japan just weeks after his death
Sangha is accused of using her North Hollywood residence to store, package, and distribute narcotics, including ketamine and methamphetamine. Pictured: Narcotics recovered during a March 2024 raid
Prosecutors say that Sangha’s distribution of ketamine on October 4, 2023 led to Perry’s death
After a jet ski accident in 1997 caused back problems he became addicted to painkillers and recalled in his 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing that he was popping 55 pills a day.
He tried multiple times to get clean and was frequently in rehab but always returned to drugs. In 2018, his colon ‘exploded’ due to the abuse. He spent two weeks in a coma then had to wear a colostomy bag for months.
Perry estimated that he went to rehab 15 times, detoxed 65 times and attended 6,000 AA meetings in his decades-long struggle with drug addiction.
‘Not only do I have the disease, but I also have it bad,’ he wrote. ‘I have it as bad as you can have it, in fact. It’s back-to-the-wall time all the time. It’s going to kill me.’ In the days leading up to his death on October 28 last year he was thought to be living quietly at his luxury home overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Vastly overweight, he spent his days obsessively playing the popular game of pickleball with a trainer and watching TV into the small hours.
Various romances over the years had failed to work out and friends painted a picture of a man who had it all – fame, wealth, good looks and charisma – but who was desperately lonely and unhappy.
He played the wisecracking character Chandler Bing in the sitcom Friends
Perry (right) is seen alongside Friends co-star Matt Le Blanc backstage following a performance of the play The End Of Longing at London’s Playhouse Theatre in April 2016
Tributes were left to Matthew Perry last October in front of a New York building used for exterior shots featured in the sitcom Friends
He was found face down in the hot tub in his garden and in December, the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office ruled that the actor had died of the acute effects of ketamine with contributing effects of drowning and ruled his death an accident.
Perry had been prescribed ketamine as therapy for depression ten days before his death but the post-mortem concluded that he could not have died from the effects of prescription drugs as these last only three to four hours. The drugs that caused his death were not part of his treatment.
A joint investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency and the US Postal Service was launched to find the person or people responsible for supplying the actor with drugs. After months of hard work by the task force and evidence put before a grand jury, five people in Perry’s close circle were charged this week.
Not only are they accused of contributing to Perry’s death by supplying him with the drug that killed him but also of trying desperately to cover up their involvement after his death.
Plascencia, who worked in clinics in Santa Monica and was praised by patients for his ‘big smile and caring and compassionate nature,’ is charged with seven counts of distribution of ketamine and two of altering and falsifying documents or records related to the federal investigation.
Mark Chavez, another doctor who once ran a legal ketamine clinic, has agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine.
Perry’s book Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir came out in November 2022
He admitted in his plea agreement to selling ketamine to Plasencia, including drugs diverted from his clinic.
Chavez also obtained additional ketamine to transfer to Plasencia by making false representations to a wholesale ketamine distributor and by submitting a fraudulent prescription in the name of a former patient without that patient’s knowledge or consent.
According to prosecutors, Plasencia and Chavez came into contact with Perry last year after hearing that he was interested in treating his depression and anxiety with ketamine.
But instead of helping him to work through his addiction struggles, the two doctors ruthlessly exploited him. The two messaged each other gleefully over how much they could charge the actor, whose estate after death was said to be worth around $120million.
‘I wonder how much this moron will pay,’ Plascencia is alleged to have texted Chavez.
The two doctors conspired with Perry’s assistant Iwamasa and Erik Fleming, an acquaintance of Perry’s and a street dealer, to supply the actor with drugs.
They used encrypted messaging applications and coded language to discuss drug deals, including referring to bottles of ketamine as ‘Dr Pepper,’ ‘cans’ and ‘bots’.
In his last post to his Instagram Perry shared images of him in his pool where he would later be found dead
Plasencia taught Iwamasa, who had no medical training and who knew little, if anything, about administering controlled substances, to inject the ketamine multiple times a day.
Fleming, 54, has pleaded guilty 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 ketamine that killed Perry.
He further admitted to obtaining the ketamine from his source, Jasveen Sangha – known in her North Hollywood neighbourhood as the Ketamine Queen – and to distributing 50 vials of ketamine to Iwamasa – half of them four days before Perry’s death.
Iwamasa, 59, has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death and admitted to repeatedly injecting Perry with ketamine without medical training, including performing multiple injections on Perry on October 28, 2023 – the day he died.
Sangha, 41, has also been charged with distribution of ketamine. She used her home, nicknamed the Sangha Stash House, to store, package and distribute narcotics including ketamine.
Over the Signal encrypted messaging system, Sangha offered Fleming samples of the drug for Perry to try, writing: ‘It’s unmarked but it’s amazing – he take one [sic] and try it and I have more if he likes.’
Fleming then messaged Iwamasa a screenshot of clear glass bottles of ketamine and said: ‘She [Sangha] only deals with high end and celebs. If it were not great stuff, she’d lose her business.’
Charges against five people in relation to Matthew Perry’s death were announced by Drug Enforcement Agency administrator Anne Milgram at a news conference on Thursday
Drug Enforcement Agency administrator Anne Milgram said: ‘We allege each of the defendants played a key role in his death by falsely prescribing, selling or injecting the ketamine that caused Matthew Perry’s tragic death. Matthew Perry’s journey began with unscrupulous doctors who abused their position of trust because they saw him as a payday, to street dealers who gave him ketamine in unmarked vials.’
Sangha, Milgram said, had a history of drug trafficking and had previously sold ketamine to a victim by the name of Cody McLaury who took it and died of an overdose within hours.
When a family member sent Sangha a text message saying that her ketamine had killed McLaury, Sangha conducted a Google search for ‘can ketamine be listed as a cause of death’. She nonetheless continued to sell ketamine from her stash house.
Following Perry’s death, Sangha and Fleming used the Signal app to discuss how they could distance themselves from any investigation into the tragedy. They updated the setting on Signal to automatically delete messages and also deleted messages on their mobile phones. However, these were recovered by the task force.
Fleming sent a message to Sangha on October 30, two days after Perry’s demise, which read: ‘Please call… got more info and want to bounce ideas off you. I’m 90 per cent sure everyone is protected. I never dealt with [Matthew Perry] only his assistant.
‘So, the assistant was the enabler. Also, they are doing a three-month tox screening – does K stay in your system or is it immediately flushed out?’
Multiple law enforcement agencies have carried out searches, seizing computers, phones and other devices to try and establish which of the suspects was responsible for giving Perry the fatal dose
When Sangha’s house was raided, investigators said they found a ‘drugs emporium’ including 79 bottles containing clear liquid that tested positive for ketamine and was manufactured by someone Sangha referred to as the ‘master chef’ and ‘chief scientist’.
Speaking about the charges, Derek Maltz, the former director of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s special operation division, told the Mail: ‘I take my hat off to all the law enforcement agencies that worked on this significant investigation and got results so quickly.
‘It’s sad to see such a great actor who had addiction issues and who was suffering from depression and anxiety be taken advantage of by these unscrupulous people.
‘Doctors are supposed to ‘do no harm’ but these doctors, and the people they worked with, were predators. They saw Mr Perry’s vulnerabilities and took advantage of it.
‘It was all about the money. It is disgusting and I hope they are held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.’
Perry’s mother Suzanne and stepfather Keith have retreated behind the doors of their home in Newport Beach to grieve this latest tragic chapter in Perry’s story but added in their statement: ‘We look forward to justice taking its course.’