'Ketamine Queen' gets 15 years for Matthew Perry’s death

LOS ANGELES

A federal judge on April 8 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 on April 8 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.