The Los Angeles woman known as the “Ketamine Queen” pleaded guilty Wednesday to five federal counts in connection with the fatal overdose of “Friends” actor Matthew Perry in 2023, a court spokesman said.
Jasveen Sangha, 42, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, three counts of distribution of ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death or serious bodily injury.
Sangha, a dual citizen of the United States and the U.K. who has been in federal custody since August 2024, faces a maximum prison sentence of 65 years, prosecutors said last month in a news release. She is set to be sentenced on Dec. 10.
“She’s taking responsibility for her actions,” Mark Geragos, Sangha’s attorney, said in a brief statement last month after prosecutors announced that she had agreed to plead guilty.
Perry was found face down in the heated end of his pool at his Los Angeles home on Oct. 28, 2023. He was 54.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office attributed his death to an accidental overdose of ketamine, a hallucinogenic anesthetic that in recent years has gained popularity as an off-label, unregulated treatment for depression.
Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing on “Friends,” spoke openly about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction, chronicling some of those experiences in the 2022 memoir “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.”
In his final months, Perry had been undergoing ketamine infusion therapy to treat depression and anxiety. But he sought unsupervised doses, developing a dependence on the drug that was “spiraling out of control,” leading up to his death, prosecutors have said.
The medical examiner’s office said the amount of ketamine found in his body was equivalent to the amount used in general anesthesia.
Sangha worked with a man named Erik Fleming to give ketamine to Perry, prosecutors have said, citing Sangha’s plea agreement. In the month of Perry’s death, Sangha and Fleming sold Perry 51 vials of ketamine and provided them to Kenneth Iwamasa, his live-in personal assistant, according to prosecutors.
Iwamasa repeatedly injected Perry with the ketamine leading up to the fatal overdose, prosecutors have said — including at least three shots on the day he was found dead.
Sangha called Fleming on the encrypted messaging application Signal after having learned from news reports that Perry had died, according to prosecutors. “Delete all our messages,” Sangha instructed Fleming.
Fleming pleaded guilty in August 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death. Iwamasa pleaded guilty the same month to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death.
