When prosecutors announced the charges against them in the overdose death of Matthew Perry earlier this month, they were careful to highlight the nickname one defendant gave another. In text messages, Erik Fleming, a drug trafficker whose career as a director and producer fizzled out in the mid-2010s, describes Jasveen Sangha, a 41-year-old woman accused of running a North Hollywood safehouse dubbed the “ketamine queen.” The epithet stuck and captured the dark spirit of the underworld that appeared in court documents and tabloids.
According to Ashley Connor, Perry’s death fits a pattern that often plays out at the intersection of celebrity and chemical dependency, according to a psychologist who works with addiction in Santa Monica. “Celebrity status creates specific vulnerabilities that can make them go through life wondering who they trust. And that often leads them to rely on an inner circle.”
With the cultural permanence that it offers Amis, Perry has become a magnet for people on the other side of the slippery border of Hollywood recognition.
“There can be a bilateral codependency that can then occur,” Connor said, “and that becomes maladaptive.”
For more than three decades, Kenneth Iwamasa, A 59-year-old personal assistant from Midland, Michigan, provided administrative help in Hollywood. He held various positions for Doug Chapin, a producer and manager for Perry. Iwamasa eventually became the actor’s house sitter, and paparazzi caught the couple shopping at the Nike store in The Grove last year.
As court documents show, Iwamasa and his four co-defendants formed a sinister circle around the actor and his highly publicized addictions. He, Fleming and a doctor pleaded guilty to various drug charges; Sangha and another doctor pleaded not guilty. In the final weeks of his boss’s life, Iwamasa obtained ketamine worth about $55,000 for Perry.
“I wonder how much this idiot is going to pay,” one doctor texted the other, according to court documents.
According to the The Los Angeles Times, Brooke Mueller, a former actor and ex-wife of Charlie Sheen, She volunteered information to investigators that linked Sangha and Fleming to the case. Like Perry, though to a lesser extent, Mueller has seen his battles with addiction become tabloid fodder.
Fleming has always been “hooked” on Mueller, Courtney Friel, a KTLA anchor and former friend of Mueller’s, told me.
Fleming’s plea agreement stated that he and Perry knew each other through a mutual friend, unnamed, and that the month Perry died, the friend told him that Perry was looking for ketamine.
In 1999, Fleming made a teen film Scarlett Johansson in the children’s film My brother the pig. Later he co-ran a short-lived production company with Sydney Hollande, one of Sumner Redstone’s two girlfriends embroiled in a long-running financial and legal dispute with the late media billionaire. And in recent years, with his filmmaking days behind him, the Hollywood Reporter writing this week, he became a program director at a Bel-Air rehab center where Mueller’s boyfriend overdosed and died in 2021. (According to the rehab center’s attorney, Fleming was not at the scene that day.)
Several months before Perry’s death, when authorities searched Sangha’s home in connection with another drug bust, they found 79 vials of ketamine, about 2,000 grams of Xanax and a gun registered to her boyfriend. (She pleaded not guilty in that case; her mother posted her $100,000 bail in March.)
She has also become a figure of media fascination in recent weeks, partly thanks to the social life she has documented on Instagram. “How on earth did a doctor’s daughter end up being born into a respectable British Sikh family?” the actress wonders. Daily Mail Last week, she was asked if she “got sucked into the sordid death of one of the world’s most famous television actors.” She did, on the surface, practice a flashy maximalism in her tastes, but perhaps not much more than her peers. The characters around her tended to have their own porous relationships with the entertainment industry. Sangha went on vacation to Mexico with Greg Lansky, a French pornographic film director whose work, along with his professions as an auteur, has won praise from Kanye West. Slash ex-wife Pearl Hudson, Posing with Sangha at the beach in July 2021, she described her friend as her “Mary” and “a true gift to us all.”
Two years earlier, prosecutors said, Sangha sold ketamine to a 33-year-old man who died shortly afterward of an overdose. “The ketamine you sold my brother killed him,” his sister texted him, according to the indictment. “That’s listed as the cause of death.”
Fleming told Iwamasa that Sangha “only dealt with celebrities and high-end clients,” according to his plea agreement. “If it wasn’t good stuff,” he added, “she would lose her business.” The next day, he said in his plea agreement, he told Sangha the name of the person to whom he would sell the ketamine. In subsequent messages, Fleming said, Sangha began using an unappealing nickname for the client, referring to him simply as the “well-known character” he played on a television series.
Fleming obtained the vials from Sangha’s home, as per his agreement, and delivered them to Iwamasa. It was as his assistant, Iwamasa acknowledged in his plea agreement, that he injected Perry with the ketamine that contributed to his death in October.
Sangha has retained the services of lawyers from a firm headed by Marc Geragos, known to represent Bill ClintonWhitewater Business Partner Susan McDougal (as well as the former president’s half-brother Roger Jr. in a 2001 drunk driving case). He has also handled a variety of tabloid-ready Hollywood clients, including Winona Ryder after his arrest for shoplifting in 2001 and Jussie Smollett.
“Just because it’s a tragedy doesn’t make it a crime,” Geragos told NewsNation. Chris Cuomo hours after the charges against his client were announced. “I understand that people want to hold others accountable. I understand that… But I think they’re going to have a very difficult time holding others accountable.”
It wasn’t an entirely new feeling. There’s little sign that Perry was forced into self-destruction and plenty that he was eagerly presented with opportunities. “I mean, ultimately,” a friend of Sangha’s told the Mail, “Nobody forces anyone to take drugs.”
