The Los Angeles woman charged with selling the liquid ketamine injected into Matthew Perry shortly before his overdose death in a jacuzzi two years ago has reached a plea deal with prosecutors, making her the fifth and final defendant to agree to plead guilty in the high-profile case.
Dubbed the “Ketamine Queen” in court filings, Jasveen Sangha, 42, has agreed to plead guilty to five federal charges, including that she provided the ketamine that resulted in Perry’s October 2023 death, officials said. Sangha further admitted to selling four vials of ketamine to victim Cody McLaury in August 2019, the agreement filed Monday states. McLaury died hours later from a drug overdose. (Sangha was charged with ten counts in her indictment.)
At sentencing, Sangha is facing a maximum possible sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison for maintaining a so-called “stash house.” She’s also facing up to 10 years for each of her three ketamine distribution counts, and up to 15 years for her single count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death or serious bodily injury, officials said.
Sangha was due to begin a jury trial on Sept. 23. She’s been in custody since she was arrested last August. At the time of Sangha’s indictment, prosecutors said investigators seized 79 vials of ketamine and “multiple pounds of methamphetamine pills” when they raided her residence in March 2024.
Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing on the hit sitcom Friends, died on Oct. 28, 2023, at the age of 54 from the acute effects of ketamine, his autopsy determined. He waged a public battle with severe drug addiction before the tragedy, writing in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, that he “should be dead.” In the New York Times bestseller, Perry recalled having his first alcoholic drink at the age of 14, getting hooked on painkillers after suffering an injury in a jet ski accident and spending much of his adult life in and out of treatment facilities “struggling to get this monkey off my back.”
In court filings, prosecutors said Sangha sold 25 vials of liquid ketamine to Perry on Oct. 14, 2023, and another 25 vials ten days later, using a middleman identified as Erik Fleming, one of her co-defendants in the case. Prosecutors said Sangha knew Perry was the buyer. She sold Perry the ketamine in unlabeled glass vials, meaning there was no indication of the strength of the drug that was injected intramuscularly, officials said. “It’s unmarked but it’s amazing – he take one and try it and I have more if he likes,” she wrote in a text before she passed along the first dose, court filings said. Sangha charged $160 per vial, with Fleming hiking the price up to $220 per vial, according to paperwork in the case.
On the day Perry died, the actor’s live-in assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, gave him three injections of the ketamine supplied by Sangha. When Iwamasa returned from running errands, he found Perry floating facedown in an outdoor hot tub at his home in the upscale Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Upon learning of Perry’s death, Sangha reached out to Fleming and then sent him a follow-up text message “reiterating that he should delete all of their prior text messages,” prosecutors said. Sangha also updated the settings on the encrypted messaging app Signal to automatically delete her messages with Fleming, filings said.
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According to officials, Sangha knew or should have known that the 50 vials of the dissociative anesthetic that she sold to Perry were dangerous because another man died in 2019 with ketamine that she supplied in his system. Sangha allegedly asked Google, “Can ketamine be listed as a cause of death,” after the man’s relative sent her a text message blaming her for the fatal overdose.
Sangha was described as one of two “lead” defendants when the criminal case involving Perry was unsealed last year. The other main defendant was identified as Salvador Plasencia, a medical doctor who also sold liquid ketamine to Perry in the weeks leading up to his death. On the same day Sangha and Plasencia were arrested, prosecutors announced they already had extracted guilty pleas from Iwamasa and Fleming. Prosecutors also said they reached a plea agreement with a different doctor, Mark Charvez, who supplied ketamine to Plasencia.
Prosecutors said Iwamasa was the first to cooperate in the case while it was still sealed. He pleaded guilty on Aug. 7, 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death. He admitted he repeatedly injected Perry with ketamine without medical training. Iwamasa’s sentencing is set for Nov. 19, 2025.
Fleming pleaded guilty on Aug. 8, 2024, to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death. His sentencing is set for Nov. 12. Chavez, meanwhile, is due to be sentenced on Sept. 17.
In June, prosecutors announced they reached their fourth plea agreement, this time with Plasencia. He pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles on July 23. His sentencing set for Dec. 3, 2025.
“These defendants took advantage of Mr. Perry’s addiction issues to enrich themselves,” former U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said at a press conference announcing the case last year. “They knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew what they were doing was risking great danger to Mr. Perry, but they did it anyways. In the end, these defendants were more interested in profiting off Mr. Perry than caring for his well-being.”
From Rolling Stone US
