Matthew Perry‘s death was already tragic, and as more contextual details are uncovered about it, it just gets more devastating. There was a huge break in the criminal investigation into the actor’s accidental overdose earlier this week, when five people were arrested on charges of conspiracy to distribute ketamine for their alleged involvement. One of the defendants was Perry’s longtime live-in personal assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, who has pleaded guilty — and his plea agreement, obtained by Rolling Stone, contains one of the most detailed records of the Friends star’s final days.
According to the court documents, Perry — who had long struggled with his sobriety — asked Iwamasa to start procuring illegal drugs for him in late September 2023 and “directed him to find sources from whom to acquire the drugs.” The plea outlines Iwamasa’s dealings with two of the others charged in the case, urgent care physician Dr. Salvador Plasencia, and Eric Fleming, an acquaintance of Perry’s, with the assistant having allegedly paid the former $55,000 USD of the actor’s money for liquid ketamine and ketamine lozenges.
It was seemingly through Fleming that Iwamasa was linked with Jasveen Sangha, another defendant and alleged “Ketamine Queen” of North Hollywood. Between these two sources, Iwamasa was reportedly obtaining ketamine for Perry on a near-daily basis, and often administered the ketamine shots himself despite lacking medical training. (Plasencia allegedly also injected Perry on several occasions.)
In the days leading up to his death, the actor was said to be receiving multiple of these injections per day, and was twice found unconscious at his Los Angeles home. On October 28, the day he died, Perry first directed Iwamasa to inject him with a syringe of ketamine at around 8:30 a.m., followed by a second dose at 12:45 while he watched a movie. It was about 40 minutes after that that Perry asked the assistant to “prepare the jacuzzi” for him and then said, “Shoot me up with a big one.”
After that, Iwamasa left to run errands and when he returned, he discovered the actor “face down in the jacuzzi and deceased,” the document reads. Like Iwamasa, Fleming and Mark Chavez, another doctor charged in the case, have also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine. Plasencia and Sangha have each entered a not-guilty plea.
