‘Ketamine Queen’ gets 15 years in prison for selling Matthew Perry the drugs that killed him

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday handed down a sentence of 15 years in prison to a woman who pleaded guilty to selling “Friends” star Matthew Perry the ketamine that killed him in 2023.

“You’re going to have to show some epic resilience,” Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett said to Jasveen Sangha, echoing the defendant’s words earlier in the hearing about her self-improvement.

The 42-year-old became the third defendant sentenced of the five people who have pleaded guilty in connection with the overdose of the 54-year-old actor. His role as Chandler Bing on NBC’s “Friends” in the 1990s and 2000s made him one of the biggest television stars of the era.

Sangha stood at the podium Wednesday just before she was sentenced and told the judge she wears her shame “like a jacket.” She is the only defendant whose plea deal included an acknowledgment of causing Perry’s death, and her prison term will almost certainly be far longer than all the others combined.

“These were not mistakes. They were horrible decisions,” Sangha said, which “shattered people’s lives and the lives of their family and friends.”

Prosecutors cast her in court filings as a “Ketamine Queen” who had an elaborate drug operation catering to high-end clients to give herself a jet-setting lifestyle despite a life of privilege.

Sangha’s attorneys said in their sentencing filing that the time she has spent in jail since her August 2024 indictment should be sufficient. They pointed to her lack of a previous criminal record and exemplary behavior as an inmate, as well as the unlikelihood she would return to a life of drug dealing.

Keith Morrison, Perry’s stepfather and correspondent for NBC’s “Dateline,” told the judge that he and Perry’s mother, Suzanne, feel a “daily, grinding sadness and sorrow.”

“There was a spark to that man I have never seen anywhere else,” Morrison said in his familiar and dramatic voice. “He should have had another act. Two more acts.”

Perry was found dead in the hot tub at his Los Angeles home. The medical examiner ruled that ketamine, typically used as a surgical anesthetic, was the primary cause of death.

Perry had been using the drug through his regular doctor as a legal off-label treatment for depression. But he sought more than the doctor would give him. That at first led him to Dr. Salvador Plasencia, who admitted to illegally selling Perry ketamine and was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison. And it later led Perry to Sangha, who sold him 25 vials of ketamine, including the fatal dose, for $6,000 in cash four days before his death, prosecutors said.

Another doctor, who admitted to providing Plasencia the ketamine he sold to Perry, was sentenced to eight months of home detention. Perry’s assistant and his friend, who admitted acting as the actor’s middlemen, are awaiting sentencing.

The judge said she calibrated how to sentence each of the five defendants to make sense as a whole.

Sangha pleaded guilty in September to one count of using her home for drug distribution, three counts of distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death. She also admitted to selling drugs to another man, 33-year-old Cody McLaury, who had no connection to Perry, before his overdose death in 2019.

The prosecution said that despite Sangha’s plea, she continued drug dealing, showing her lack of remorse.

Their sentencing filing says that in 2020, when she learned that the ketamine she sold McLaury contributed to his death, “She didn’t care and kept selling.” In 2023, the filing says that when she learned she sold Perry the drugs that caused his death, “Her reaction was the same: she didn’t care and kept selling.”