Getty Image
Five people were arrested in connection to the death of Friends star Matthew Perry on Thursday, August 15, leading to a bevy of details about his untimely passing becoming public.
According to reports, two of those charged are doctors who were charging Matthew Perry $2000 for vials of ketamine that cost $12 and even taught his assistant how to inject him with it.
After purchasing ketamine from the doctors became too expensive, Perry turned to buying it off the street and purchased it from a drug trafficker Jasveen Sangha, who is apparently known as the “ketamine queen” of Los Angeles.
The five people named in the indictment are Sangha, doctors Salvador Plasencia and Mark Chavez, Perry’s assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, and Erik Fleming, a “broker.”
Unearthed text messages reveal that in addition to risking his life, Perry’s dealers were also ripping him off, as Salvador Plasencia said in a text “I wonder how much this moron will pay.”
“Delete all our messages,” Sangha texted indicted co-conspirator Erik Fleming after Perry’s passing.
According to the indictment, the group extracted $55,000 from Perry during a two-month period in the fall of 2023 prior to his death on October 28.
Plasencia, who faces a maximum sentence of 120 years in federal prison, kept providing ketamine to Perry despite acknowledging to another patient that same month that Perry’s addiction was “spiraling out of control.” Sangha faces a minimum of 10 years and a maximum sentence of life in prison.
“Matthew Perry’s journey began with unscrupulous doctors who abused their position of trust because they saw him as a payday, and it ended with street dealers who sold him ketamine in unmarked vials,” said DEA administrator Anne Milgram during a press conference on Thursday
“The desperation that led Perry to these individuals was not met with help as it should have been from the doctors, but instead it was met with exploitation.”
Perry was found dead in the hot tube of his Los Angeles, California home on October 28, 2023, with traces of ketamine in his system.