The North Hollywood woman dubbed the “Ketamine Queen” by prosecutors pleaded guilty Wednesday to supplying the ketamine that led to actor Matthew Perry’s overdose death in a hot tub two years ago.
Jasveen Sangha, 42, appeared in federal court in downtown Los Angeles and pleaded guilty to five felony charges, including that she ran a stash house out of her upscale apartment and sold four vials of ketamine to another victim, Cody McLaury, in August 2019. McLaury died hours later from a drug overdose.
Wearing a khaki jail jumpsuit and shackles on her ankles, Sangha admitted she knew that the 50 vials of liquid ketamine she was selling to a middleman in October 2023 were destined for use by Perry. “There was no way I could tell 100%, but as far as [Fleming] told me, yes,” Sangha told U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett when asked if she knew Perry was the buyer. “I didn’t know if it was all of [the vials] or some, but I knew something was going to [Perry], yes,” she said, standing in court beside her high-powered defense lawyer, Mark Geragos.
Perry’s mother, Suzanne Perry, and stepfather, Keith Morrison, sat silently in the courtroom’s back row and did not speak with reporters after the morning hearing. Sangha’s mother sat across the gallery and blew kisses to her daughter as Sangha was led back into custody. At the hearing, Sangha became the fifth and final defendant to be convicted in the high-profile case. Her co-defendants who previously pleaded guilty were two medical doctors, the middleman, Erik Fleming, and Perry’s live-in assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa.
“It’s a tragedy,” Geragos said of Perry’s death as he spoke to reporters outside the courthouse. “She feels horrible about all of this. Nobody wants to be in the chain of causation, for lack of a better term. So yeah, she feels horrible. She’s felt horrible since day one,” he said.
Geragos declined to describe the plea negotiations, but he said his client “always wanted to take responsibility from day one.” He said Sangha has spent the year she’s already spent in custody engaging in self-improvement programs and volunteering. Still, the criminal case and her incarceration have been “a horrendous experience,” he said.
Sangha is facing a total maximum sentence of up to 65 years in prison, a fine of up to $2.5 million, and the possibility of a lifetime of supervised release, though she’ll likely receive much less. Her sentencing hearing is set for Dec. 10.
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She originally was facing nine counts in her superseding indictment. The other counts centered on a purported conspiracy and the alleged possession of other drugs. Prosecutors agreed to dismiss the other four counts at sentencing.
Geragos said he and his co-counsel Alexandra Kazarian plan to call experts at the sentencing hearing who will testify about the drugs in Perry’s system and other factors linked to “causation.” He accused prosecutors of “turning responsibility in this case on its head.”
“I think most people, if you talk to them about this case, their biggest problem with it is: ‘Why is she in custody and the [other defendants], whether it’s medical professionals or the people who were actually ingesting the drug or the people who were administering the drug, are out?’” He declined to say how much prison time the defense plans to recommend.
“Once there are experts who will opine, it will be a more robust understanding of what happened. I think there’s a lot of mitigation in this case. I think there are a lot of things we will present that will give a clearer picture of what actually happened, and the levels of responsibility,” Geragos said.
Before she signed her plea agreement last month, Sangha was due to begin a jury trial on Sept. 23. She has been in custody since her August 2024 arrest. 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 10 days later, using a middleman identified as Erik Fleming, one of her co-defendants in the case. Sangha agreed Wednesday that she sold Perry the ketamine in unlabeled glass vials, meaning there was no indication of the strength of the drug that was injected intramuscularly.
“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 revealed. 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, Iwamasa gave him three injections of the ketamine supplied by Sangha, prosecutors said. When Iwamasa returned from running errands, he found Perry floating facedown in the outdoor jacuzzi at his home in the tony Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles.
Upon learning of Perry’s death, Sangha reached out to Fleming and 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, she admitted Wednesday.
According to prosecutors, Sangha knew or should have known that the 50 vials of the dissociative anesthetic that she sold to Perry were dangerous because McLaury died in 2019 with ketamine that she supplied in his system. Sangha allegedly googled, “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 reached a plea agreement with a different doctor, Mark Chavez, 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 Dec. 17.
In June, prosecutors announced they reached their fourth plea agreement, this time with Plasencia. He later pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles on July 23. Sentencing for Plasencia is set for Dec. 3.
“The defendant essentially acted as a street-corner drug dealer peddling a dangerous substance to somebody he knew was addicted,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ian Yanniello said of Plasencia at a hearing last year. “He commented to another patient that the victim was spiraling out of control, yet he still offered to sell [Perry] more ketamine.”
Yanniello declined to speak with reporters as he left Sangha’s hearing on Wednesday.
“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 anyway. In the end, these defendants were more interested in profiting off Mr. Perry than caring for his well-being.”
From Rolling Stone US
