LOS ANGELES – More than a year after the unexpected death of beloved *Friends* star Matthew Perry, another perpetrator has been held legally accountable for his fatal overdose. On Wednesday, 61-year-old Kenneth Iwamasa, the personal assistant who repeatedly administered ketamine injections to Perry in the days leading up to his death, received a federal prison sentence of three years and five months. He is the fifth person sentenced to date in connection with the actor’s passing, after pleading guilty to a charge of conspiracy to distribute ketamine resulting in death.
Court documents lay out a grim timeline of reckless drug use in Perry’s final days. Prosecutors confirm that between late October 2023 and the day of his death, Iwamasa – who resided at Perry’s upscale Los Angeles residence – gave the actor more than 25 ketamine injections, including at least three separate doses on the day he died. On his last day alive, Perry himself asked Iwamasa for a large injection, according to official court filings.
In a heartbreaking statement submitted to U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett, Perry’s mother Suzanne Morrison laid bare the family’s betrayal. The Morrison family had trusted Iwamasa implicitly, she explained, saying his core role was to act as a companion and guardian for her son as he fought a long, public battle with addiction. “We trusted a man without a conscience, and my son paid the price,” Morrison wrote.
Defense attorneys for Iwamasa have attempted to frame their client as a powerless hired hand, arguing he was unable to push back against the demands of his wealthy, famous employer. In a pre-sentencing court filing, the defense claimed Iwamasa was uniquely vulnerable to the unequal power dynamic of his relationship with Perry, noting simply: “In short, he could not ‘simply say no.’ That inability had tragic consequences.”
Iwamasa’s conviction closes another chapter in the investigation into Perry’s death, which has already seen four other people sentenced for their roles in facilitating the actor’s addiction. The first convictions handed down tied to the case include two medical professionals who profited heavily from Perry’s dependency. Salvador Plasencia, one of the two doctors, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Prosecutors found Plasencia was the person who taught the untrained Iwamasa how to administer ketamine injections, despite knowing Iwamasa held no medical license and had no training treating patients with controlled substances. Plasencia and his co-conspirator, doctor Mark Chavez, sourced the ketamine for Perry at massively inflated prices, with Plasencia once joking in a message, “I wonder how much this moron will pay.” Chavez received a sentence of house arrest rather than prison time.
Earlier this month, Erik Fleming, a certified drug counselor who acted as a middleman to supply Perry with controlled substances, was ordered to serve two years behind bars. Last month, Jasveen Sangha, a British-American drug dealer nicknamed “The Ketamine Queen” who marketed herself as a supplier to A-list celebrities, received a 15-year prison sentence, the harshest penalty handed down in the case to date.
Perry, 54, who became a global icon for his portrayal of sarcastic, beloved everyman Chandler Bing on the hit 1990s and 2000s sitcom *Friends*, had opened up about his decades-long struggle with substance addiction publicly. At the time of his 2023 death, he had appeared to many close colleagues to be gaining control over his disease. The actor had originally begun using ketamine as part of a supervised medical therapy program to treat his depression, but prosecutors say that by late 2023, he had developed a full addiction to the drug – an anesthetic with psychedelic properties that is also commonly misused as a club drug. Perry was found dead in his hot tub in October 2023 from an accidental overdose.
His death triggered an outpouring of global grief from multiple generations of *Friends* fans, who still adore Perry for his iconic role on the sitcom, which followed six friends navigating adulthood, romance and work in New York City. The show turned its entire main cast, all relative unknowns before the show premiered, into global A-list celebrities and earned Perry enormous wealth – but behind the fame, he continued fighting a hidden battle with alcohol and painkiller addiction that spanned decades. In 2018, he suffered a life-threatening ruptured colon caused by drug use and required multiple emergency surgeries. In his 2022 memoir, *Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing*, Perry documented his decades-long battle, writing that he had completed detoxification more than 60 times, and noted: “I have mostly been sober since 2001, save for about sixty or seventy little mishaps.”