‘Friends’ star Matthew Perry found dead in hot tub
HISTORY ·
Matthew Perry, the 54-year-old comic actor famous for his role as Chandler Bing on the sitcom “Friends,” is found dead in his hot tub on October 28, 2023.
Matthew Perry, the 54-year-old comic actor best known for playing Chandler Bing on the sitcom “Friends,” is found dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home on October 28, 2023. Perry died from the acute effects of ketamine, a powerful anesthetic that is sometimes used to treat mental health conditions. His longtime personal assistant administered the fatal dose, which was supplied through a network of doctors and drug dealers who illegally sold ketamine to the actor.
Perry was born in Massachusetts in 1969 and grew up in Ottawa, Canada, before moving to Los Angeles at age 15 to live with his father and pursue competitive tennis. He eventually turned to acting, believing fame would bring him happiness.
“Fame would change everything, and I yearned for it more than any other person on the face of the planet,” Perry wrote in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing . “I needed it. It was the only thing that would fix me. I was certain of it.”
“Friends,” which debuted in 1994, was Perry’s first major TV role and launched him from relative obscurity to A-list celebrity. Yet even as Perry’s paychecks ballooned to $1 million an episode and his character, Chandler, became a pop culture icon, the actor sank into addiction.
In his memoir, Perry said he began drinking at age 14 and got hooked on prescription painkillers in 1997 following a jet ski accident. Larger doses of opioids delivered “complete and utter euphoria,” he wrote. “I remember thinking, ‘If this doesn’t kill me, I’m doing this again.’”
During the later seasons of “Friends,” which ran until 2004, Perry was frequently drunk, high or hungover on set, prompting his concerned castmates to stage an intervention. Perry was in and out of rehab—and a frequent subject of tabloid headlines—while continuing to appear in the popular TV series.
Years of addiction took a heavy toll on Perry’s health. His colon ruptured in 2018, and he underwent 14 surgeries related to his substance abuse. Perry’s doctor also prescribed ketamine treatments for depression and anxiety.
When Perry’s doctor cut off his ketamine treatments, the actor sought alternative sources for the drug. In September 2023, Perry asked his live-in personal assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, to obtain ketamine for him. Iwamasa had known Perry for decades and was well aware of the actor’s history of addiction. Still, Iwamasa followed his boss’s orders and helped arrange for Perry to obtain ketamine from Dr. Salvador Plasencia, who got the drug from another doctor, Mark Chavez.
“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” Plasencia texted Chavez. In total, Perry paid Plasencia and another drug dealer known as the “Ketamine Queen” more than $50,000 for dozens of vials of ketamine during the last weeks of his life. Some of the doses were administered by Plasencia and others by Iwamasa, who had no medical training.
On the day Perry died, Iwamasa injected him once in the morning before a game of pickleball, then a second time in the early afternoon. While Perry was sitting near his backyard hot tub, he told Iwamasa to “Shoot me up with a big one,” after which the assistant left to run errands. When Iwamasa returned, he found Perry face down in the hot tub, unresponsive.
After initially denying his role in Perry’s death, Iwamasa admitted to buying ketamine for the actor and administering the lethal dose on October 28, 2023. Iwamasa was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison for his role in Perry’s death. Plasencia received a 2.5-year sentence and the biggest punishment—15 years in prison—went to the “Ketamine Queen,” Jasveen Sangha, a drug dealer who supplied the ketamine that killed Perry.
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