The Los Angeles drug dealer whom prosecutors dubbed the “Ketamine Queen” was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years in prison for supplying the powerful dissociative anesthetic that killed actor Matthew Perry in his hot tub two and a half years ago took his life in the backyard.
Jasveen Sangha had asked for a lenient sentence – namely, credit for time already served. She referred to her lack of a criminal record and the 20 months she had spent in custody since her arrest in August 2024. The public prosecutor, however, urged the court to impose 15 years in prison – one year more than the federal parole authority had recommended.
“It is my opinion that you were probably the most complicit of all the defendants in this case,” Judge Sherilyn P. Garnett said from the bench. “This is not a judgment about whether you are a bad person, but about your illegal behavior. … You will have to exercise extraordinary strength.”
Judgment and conditions
The judge also ordered three years of supervised probation. She refused to release Sangha from prison for a medical procedure before she began her sentence.
Perry’s stepfather, Keith Morrison, gave a victim witness statement and called Perry a “brilliant” person with “many demons.” “It is a daily, grueling grief and pain that we all feel,” he said. Addressing Sangha, he added: “I don’t hate you… but the fact is, you supplied drugs to an addict… None of us wish that on you, but the law is the law.”
In her own statement to the court, Sangha said she had learned from her “own bad decisions” and wanted to make amends. “I destroyed people’s lives,” she said. “I wear my shame like a second skin.”
Sangha’s guilt and accusations
Sangha, 42, pleaded guilty to five federal charges last September. She admitted supplying Perry with large amounts of ketamine – including the fatal dose – and selling four vials of the drug to a man named Cody McLaury in August 2019. McLaury died a few hours later from mixed intoxication with acute ketamine poisoning.
Perry, best known for his role in “Friends,” died on October 28, 2023 from acute complications of ketamine poisoning, an autopsy revealed. He was 54 and had published his memoirs a year earlier, in which he wrote candidly about his decades-long struggle with alcohol and drug addiction.
According to her agreement with prosecutors, Sangha conspired with middleman Erik Fleming, 55, to supply Perry with ketamine in October 2023. Sangha admitted selling 51 vials that were delivered to Perry’s then-personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa, who was staying with him. On the day of his death, Perry received at least three intramuscular injections of Sangha’s ketamine from Iwamasa, prosecutors said.
Cover-up after Perry’s death
After learning of Perry’s death, Sangha called Fleming on Signal and changed the settings on her encrypted messaging apps so that messages were automatically deleted. She also ordered Fleming to “delete all of our messages,” forensic evidence showed.
Fleming pleaded guilty on August 8, 2024, to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death. His sentencing is scheduled for April 29. Iwamasa, who was the first to reach a plea agreement with prosecutors, pleaded guilty on August 7, 2024, to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine resulting in death. He admitted to repeatedly injecting Perry, despite having no medical training. His verdict is due to be handed down on April 22nd.
The widespread criminal case also involved two doctors. Both eventually pleaded guilty to selling Perry large quantities of liquid ketamine in the weeks before he began buying from Sangha. Dr. Salvador Plasencia was sentenced to 30 months in prison last December, Dr. Mark Chavez received eight months of house arrest and three years of supervised probation.
Support from the environment
Last month, Slash’s ex-wife Perla Hudson wrote a letter to the court defending Sangha as a “selfless” person who deserves mercy. She said their friendship dates back to 2012 and that Sangha regularly attended her son’s birthday parties and other family gatherings.
“Over the years, she has become like a younger sister to me and a beloved ‘fairy godmother’ to my sons,” Hudson wrote in her letter to the court. “When I was going through my divorce, one of the most difficult times of my life, Jasveen was a constant and loyal friend.”
When Sangha pleaded guilty last year, she admitted to packaging her liquid ketamine in unlabeled glass vials that did not indicate drug concentration. Before the verdict was announced, Sangha’s lawyers disputed the amount of drugs seized from her home. They argued that investigators only tested 27 of more than one and a half kilograms of suspected methamphetamine.
Dispute over the evidence
“The court should not simply consider the entire weight seized to be methamphetamine without evidence that the sample allows reliable conclusions,” her attorney Alexandra Kazarian wrote in a sentencing brief. She explained that it was not clear from the files what criteria were used to select the 27 pills or whether the larger quantity had a uniform composition – which calls into question the “extrapolation” used to calculate the penalty range.
Kazarian also disputed the prosecution’s claim that Sangha ran a drug bunker. While she acknowledged evidence of drugs, cash, packaging materials, a scale and some transactions originating from the apartment, she argued that the prosecution had not proven that drug trafficking was the apartment’s primary purpose. There is no evidence of regular customer traffic, no surveillance evidence that the apartment functioned as an ongoing sales outlet, and no substantial comparison between regular residential use and the alleged drug trafficking.
“The defendant’s sentencing plea attempts to rewrite history and portray the defendant—not the people who died from her drugs—as the victim,” Assistant Federal Attorneys Ian Yanniello and Haoxiaohan Cai wrote in their submission to the court. “But the defendant is not a victim. She repeatedly sold dangerous drugs in large quantities; she operated a drug den and directed others to help her sell; she obstructed justice to cover up her actions; and she was fully aware that her drug trafficking had contributed to the deaths of at least two people – and yet continued to sell.”
They said the decision to randomly test a sample of the thousands of “identical orange counterfeit” pressed pills seized from their home was in line with standard practice across the country. They called the argument that all 3,792 pills should have been tested individually to prove methamphetamine content “baseless.”
In an April 3 filing, prosecutors said Sangha showed a striking lack of remorse in a recorded prison phone call on Christmas Day 2024. According to prosecutors, when an unknown caller said, “We’re going to sell the book rights,” Sangha responded, “Oh, I know, the plan is in place, the damn trademark will be registered.” “Even if intended in jest, this conversation suggests that the defendant does not grasp the seriousness of her offenses and instead views her crimes as a potential future income stream. It also shows that the defendant’s previous incarceration has not yet led the defendant to adequately reflect on the serious harm she has caused,” they added.
