The “Ketamine Queen” and Matthew Perry’s Hollywood

When prosecutors announced charges in connection with the overdose death of Matthew Perry earlier this month, they made sure to highlight the nickname that one defendant had given another. In text messages, Erik Fleming, a drug dealer whose directing and producing career had fizzled by the mid-2010s, described Jasveen Sangha, a 41-year-old woman accused of running a North Hollywood stash house, as the “ketamine queen.” The epithet stuck and captured the noirish spirit of the underworld that came into view in court papers and tabloids.

According to Ashley Connor, a psychologist who works on addiction issues in Santa Monica, Perry’s death fit a pattern that often recurs at the nexus of fame and chemical dependency. “There’s these specific vulnerabilities of having this celebrity status,” she said, “where they might move through life with this trepidation of who they trust. And this often leads to them leaning on an inner circle.”

With the cultural permanence provided to him by Friends, Perry became a magnet for people on the other side of the slippery boundary of Hollywood recognition.

“There’s a two-sided codependency that might occur there,” Connor said, “that does become maladaptive.”

For more than three decades, Kenneth Iwamasa, a 59-year-old personal assistant from Midland, Michigan, has provided administrative help to Hollywood. He worked in various capacities for Doug Chapin, a producer and Perry’s manager. Iwamasa eventually became a live-in caretaker for the actor, and paparazzi caught the pair last year making a shopping trip to the Nike store at The Grove.

As portrayed in court documents, Iwamasa and his four codefendants formed a grim circle around the actor and his well-publicized addictions. He, Fleming, and one doctor have pleaded guilty to various drug-related charges; Sangha and another doctor have pleaded not guilty. In the last weeks of his boss’s life, Iwamasa obtained about $55,000 worth of ketamine for Perry.

“I wonder how much this moron will pay,” one doctor texted the other, according to court documents.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Brooke Mueller, a former actor and the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, volunteered information to detectives that linked Sangha and Fleming to the case. Like Perryâ€"albeit to a far lesser degreeâ€"Mueller has seen her battles with addiction become tabloid fodder.

Fleming has been “a cling-on forever” to Mueller, Courtney Friel, a KTLA anchor and one-time friend of hers, told me.

Fleming’s plea agreement stated that he and Perry were acquainted through a mutual friend, without naming which, and that the month Perry died, the friend told him that Perry was looking for ketamine.

In 1999, Fleming had directed a teenaged Scarlett Johansson in the children’s movie My Brother the Pig. Later, he co-ran a short-lived production company with Sydney Holland, one of the two Sumner Redstone live-in girlfriends involved in a long-running financial and legal dispute with the late media billionaire. And in more recent years, with his filmmaking days behind him, the Hollywood Reporter wrote this week, he became a program director at a Bel-Air rehab center where Mueller’s boyfriend overdosed and died in 2021. (Per the rehab facility’s attorney, Fleming was not present on the premises that day.)

Months before Perry’s death, when authorities searched Sangha’s home in connection with a separate drug case, they found 79 vials of ketamine, about 2,000 grams of Xanax, and a firearm registered to her boyfriend. (She has pleaded not guilty in that case; her mother posted her $100,000 bond in March.)

She has also become a figure of media fascination in recent weeks, thanks in part to the social life that she documented on Instagram. “How on earth did a doctor’s daughter born into a respectable British Sikh family,” the Daily Mail asked last week, “get caught up in the sordid death of one of the most famous TV actors in the world?” She did, by appearances, practice a gaudy maximalism in her tastes, but perhaps not much more so than her peers. The cast of characters around her tended to ha ve their own porous relationships to the entertainment business. Sangha went on vacation in Mexico with Greg Lansky, a French porn director whose work, with his professions of auteurism, has won the praise of Kanye West. Slash’s ex-wife Perla Hudson, posing with Sangha at the beach in July 2021, described her friend as her “Mary” and “truly a gift to all of us.”