LOS ANGELES (AP) — A federal judge on Wednesday handed down a sentence of 15 years in prison to a woman who pleaded guilty to selling actor Matthew Perry the ketamine that killed him in 2023.
“You’re going to have to show some epic resilience,” Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett said to Jasveen Sangha, echoing the defendant’s words earlier in the hearing about her self-improvement.
Citing the unique role Sangha admitted to playing in Perry’s death and her broader drug-dealing business, the judge gave the 42-year-old a sentence that will almost certainly be more than all four of her co-defendants combined.
The hearing Wednesday in a Los Angeles courtroom was in many ways the pinnacle of the 2 1/2-year investigation and prosecution that followed the overdose death of the 54-year-old actor, whose role as Chandler Bing on NBC’s “Friends” in the 1990s and 2000s made him one of the biggest television stars of the era.
Keith Morrison, Perry’s stepfather and correspondent for NBC’s “Dateline,” told the judge that he and Perry’s mother, Suzanne, feel a “daily, grinding sadness and sorrow.”
“There was a spark to that man I have never seen anywhere else,” Morrison said.
“He should have had another act. Two more acts.”
Just before she was sentenced, Sangha told the judge she wears her shame “like a jacket.”
“These were not mistakes. They were horrible decisions,” Sangha said, which “shattered people’s lives and the lives of their family and friends.”
Prosecutors secured the exact sentence they asked for after casting Sangha as a “Ketamine Queen” who had an elaborate drug operation catering to high-end clients to give herself a jet-setting lifestyle.
Sangha’s attorneys argued the time she has spent in jail since her August 2024 indictment should be sufficient, pointing to her good behaviour behind bars and lack of prior arrests.
Perry was found dead in the hot tub at his Los Angeles home in October 2023. The medical examiner ruled that ketamine, typically used as a surgical anesthetic, was the primary cause of death — and drowning was a secondary cause.
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