Jennifer Aniston teared up when she said it—not in a dramatic way, but quietly, the way someone does after they have already cried everything out and what remains is just the truth. It was “so alarming and shocking, yet not shocking,” she told L magazine. Five words that contained 30 years of watching someone she loved be consumed by something neither of them could stop. On May 27, 2026, the final courtroom chapter of Matthew Perry’s death closed when Kenneth Iwamasa, a 61-year-old man, was sentenced to federal prison for the injections that killed Perry.
Iwamasa was Perry’s personal assistant. He had known the actor for 30 years. What prosecutors revealed about what happened inside that house in Perry’s final days is something Aniston—and everyone who loved Chandler Bing—deserved to know. Matthew Langford Perry was born on August 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
His parents divorced when he was very young. His mother, Suzanne Morrison, moved with him to Ottawa, Canada, where she worked as a press secretary for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. His father, John Bennett Perry, remained in the United States and built a career as an actor and model. At 14, in a backyard in Ottawa with his best friends, the Murray brothers, Perry drank for the first time.
He drank a full bottle of wine called Baby Duck. “I thought to myself,” he later told a television audience, “this is probably what normal people feel like all the time. ” His friends felt woozy and went home. Matthew felt like he had arrived somewhere.
That difference, so small, so invisible, so total, was the beginning of everything that followed. He moved to Los Angeles in his late teens to pursue acting. He nearly lost the role of Chandler Bing to his good friend Craig Bierko, who was offered Friends and chose another show instead. Matthew went to the audition and did it the way he always had: the specific, slightly wounded rhythm of speech he and his friends had used since childhood.
They hired him on the spot. The show started on Monday. He was the last actor hired in September 1994. By the time it was over 10 years later, he was one of the most famous people on Earth.
Friends became a cultural phenomenon that got rewatched not because it was new, but because it felt like home. At the center of it was Chandler Bing—the man who processed everything with a joke, the man who was underneath it all terrified of being abandoned. Perry made a rule for himself: he would never drink or use drugs while working. He had too much respect for the five people he worked with every day.
So he showed up. He hit his marks. He delivered lines with timing that actors who have studied comedy for decades still struggle to understand. And he was, during significant portions of that run, shaking so badly that he had to plan his movements across a set like a chess player.
He was hungover on camera in front of 30 million people, and nobody knew. Jennifer Aniston knew. She was the first to tell him. He described the confrontation in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
She came to his trailer and said, “I know you’re drinking. ” He said, “How can you tell? ” She said, “We can smell it. ” The plural hit him like a sledgehammer.
They had known. She had said nothing until she could not say nothing anymore. He wrote that it was one of the scariest moments of his career—not being caught, but understanding that the people he loved had been watching him hurt himself. She reached out to him more than anyone else during the dark periods.
He confirmed it, telling Diane Sawyer in 2022, “She was the one that reached out the most. I’m really grateful to her for that. ”
He went to 15 rehabilitation programs over 30 years. He was hospitalized more than 60 times by his own estimate.
He wrote about taking 55 Vicodin a day, about going to open houses on Sunday afternoons to steal pills from strangers’ medicine cabinets. He wrote about lying in a hospital bed for five months after his colon exploded because of his drug use in 2018, about being put on an ECMO machine—a device that breathes and pumps blood for you. There were five people on ECMO machines that night. The other four died.
His parents were told he had a 2% chance of surviving until morning. He survived. He got better. He turned his Malibu home into a sober living facility called Perry House, which ran for two years.
He wrote his memoir and published it in October 2022—almost exactly one year before he died. He went on book tours across North America and told the truth about his life with a precision people who had struggled with addiction said they had never seen from someone at his level of fame. At a Toronto event in November 2023, he said the best part about the book was hearing from people it had helped. Five people had contacted him after reading it and checked into treatment.
“When I die,” he said that night, “I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned. I want that to be the first thing. ” The audience had no way of knowing he had 11 days left. He was texting Jennifer Aniston on the morning of October 28, 2023.
She said later that he had seemed happy. He had recently quit smoking. He was getting back in shape. He told her things were good.
A few hours later, Kenneth Iwamasa injected Perry with at least three shots of ketamine obtained from a street dealer known as the “ketamine queen of North Hollywood. ” Perry went into the hot tub behind his house. Iwamasa left. Perry died alone in the water.
He was 54. The investigation that followed took two and a half years and resulted in five convictions. The full picture that emerged was not of a single catastrophic decision. It was a network of people making their own calculations, finding their own justifications, each contributing to the machinery that ended Perry’s life.
There were two doctors. Dr. Mark Chavez and Dr. Salvador Plasencia supplied Perry with ketamine, a surgical anesthetic sometimes legally used for depression.
The legal prescriptions were not enough. In a text message sent in September 2023, Plasencia wrote, “I wonder how much this will pay. ” He charged Perry $2,000 per vial of ketamine. The going price was approximately $15.
The doctors sold Perry around 20 vials for $55,000 in cash. On one occasion, Plasencia injected Perry himself and watched him freeze up, watched his blood pressure spike dangerously. His response was to tell Iwamasa, “Let’s not do that again,” and then to leave additional vials for Iwamasa to administer. Plasencia told another patient in mid-October 2023 that Perry was spiraling out of control.
He continued supplying him anyway. His medical license was surrendered in September 2025. There was Jaswinder Sangha, the “ketamine queen. ” When Perry decided the doctors were too expensive, a broker named Eric Fleming connected him with Sangha.
In the two weeks before Perry’s death, Sangha sold him 50 vials of ketamine for $11,000 in cash. When federal agents searched her home, they found 80 vials. She faces the possibility of life in prison. And there was Kenneth Iwamasa.
He had known Matthew Perry since 1992. He became Perry’s live-in assistant in 2022, paid $150,000 a year, responsible for coordinating Perry’s medical care and ensuring he took his lawfully prescribed medications. He was not a medical professional. He was a man who had known Perry for three decades and who, instead of keeping him safe, became the person who injected him.
On the day of Perry’s death, Iwamasa called 911. When officers arrived, he gave them a list of medications Perry had been prescribed. Ketamine was not on the list. He also told prosecutors that in the days after Perry’s death, he went back to the house and cleaned up the ketamine bottles and syringes.
He deleted everything. Then he called Fleming to tell him it was done. Fleming spoke publicly for the first time in May 2026, describing himself as someone who had been manipulated into a situation he did not fully understand. Federal prosecutors saw it differently.
He pleaded guilty to his own charges and was sentenced separately. At Iwamasa’s sentencing on May 27, 2026, his attorneys said he had cared tremendously for Perry and would always carry the weight of what happened. The judge told him, “You were the last person to see him alive. You found him dead.
You cleaned up the scene and lied to the police. 41 months. ”
Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, submitted a victim impact statement. She wrote that when her son hired Iwamasa, the family had been relieved.
They trusted him. “Kenny’s most important job by far,” she wrote, “was to be my son’s companion and guardian in his fight against addiction. ” She sat in the courtroom on May 27 and watched the last sentencing in the case against the people who had killed her son. The five remaining cast members—Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer—released a joint statement two days after Perry’s death.
“We are all so utterly devastated by the loss of Matthew,” it read. “We were more than just castmates. We are a family. ” They said they would say more when they were able.
Matt LeBlanc posted a personal tribute on Instagram. Courteney Cox was the most private. The loss had not begun on October 28. It had begun years earlier.
Aniston has been the most willing of the five to speak about Perry since his death. In November 2023, two weeks after his death, she posted a tribute on Instagram that began, “Oh boy, this one has cut deep. ” She called him Matty, what the people closest to him called him. She included the last text message he had sent her, a message she described as “saying it all.
” She wrote, “Matty, I love you so much and I know you are now completely at peace and out of any pain. ”
Speaking to Variety in December 2023, her first interview after his death, she said she hoped people remembered him the way he had asked to be remembered—not primarily as Chandler, but as someone who had fought something enormous and used his platform to help others fight it, too. Her voice broke briefly. She collected herself and continued.
In August 2025, speaking to Vanity Fair for a cover story, she said what she had probably been saying privately for years. The Friends cast had been mourning Matthew Perry long before he died. They had watched him fight. The disease had been more powerful than all of them.
“There’s a part of me that thinks this is better,” she said. “I’m glad he’s out of that pain. ” It is one of the most honest things anyone has said about watching someone you love be destroyed by addiction. The Friends reunion in 2021 had all six of them back on the original set for the first time in 17 years.
None of them knew at the time it would be the last time they would all be together. Aniston has called it a final curtain call. Perry appeared on that stage already diminished, still funny, still sharp, still unmistakably himself. The case that concluded on May 27, 2026 has put on the public record the specific names and specific decisions of the people who were in the room at the end.
He was 54 years old. He should have had more time. He had already done everything he said he wanted to do: written the book, helped the people, said the things he had been keeping secret for 30 years. The disease did not give him more time.
It never does.
