Kenneth Iwamasa was sentenced Wednesday to three years and five months in prison for distributing ketamine that resulted in death or serious bodily injury, closing out the criminal case tied to Matthew Perry’s overdose death in 2023.
The sentence matched what prosecutors asked for. Iwamasa, Perry’s live-in personal assistant between 2022 and 2023, pleaded guilty to the charge after admitting he injected the actor with ketamine several times without medical training. He also injected Perry with ketamine on the day the Friends star was found dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles residence.
Perry was 61 when he was found dead in 2023. Iwamasa had known him for more than two decades, and prosecutors said the relationship turned grim in the final months of Perry’s life after the actor enlisted his help in the fall of 2023 to obtain ketamine. Between September and October 2023, prosecutors said Iwamasa paid Salvador Plasencia at least $55,000 to buy ketamine on several occasions. Investigators also said he was connected to ketamine through Erik Fleming.
The scale of the drug use described by authorities was stark. In the three days before Perry died, Iwamasa injected him with six to eight shots of ketamine per day, prosecutors said. Authorities also said Iwamasa had found Perry unresponsive at least twice that month. The sentencing caps the criminal investigation into five people authorities say played a role in Perry’s overdose death.
Perry had publicly discussed struggles with opioid addiction, and federal authorities said he had pursued ketamine infusion therapy at a California clinic for anxiety and depression before turning to outside sources to raise his dosage. That backdrop made the case larger than a single fatal night. It became a map of how a treatment sought for one reason drifted into a supply chain that prosecutors say helped kill him.
The court’s sentence lands as the final major piece in that inquiry. Jasveen Sangha has already been sentenced to 15 years in prison, Fleming is expected to spend two years behind bars, Plasencia received 30 months, and Mark Chavez was sentenced in December to eight months of home detention and three years of supervised release. With Iwamasa’s case resolved, prosecutors say the story of who helped Perry obtain and use ketamine has reached its legal end.
At sentencing, Iwamasa’s lawyers argued that he could not simply say no. His attorneys said he was under pressure in a household where, as one defense filing put it, he knew that one call to someone in Perry’s circle could bring reinforcements. Prosecutors saw something else: a trusted aide who repeatedly volunteered details about what happened, even after Perry was gone, and who was close enough to be part of the fatal chain. The court accepted the government’s view on Wednesday, and the sentence now fixes his role in the case at three years and five months behind bars.
