Matthew Perry's live-in assistant is heading to prison for three years and five months after admitting he injected the Friends star with ketamine and left him to die alone in his backyard jacuzzi.
Kenneth Iwamasa was sentenced Tuesday after pleading guilty in August 2024 to conspiracy to distribute ketamine resulting in death. Court documents reveal he supplied Perry with at least 70 vials of the drug in the month before his death on October 28, 2023—including three injections on the day he died.
Prosecutors said the 41-month sentence reflected both the "life-ending harm" Iwamasa caused and the "significant cooperation" he later provided to investigators. Iwamasa had asked for six months in prison and six months of home detention, but the court rejected his request.
Perry's longtime business manager and estate executor, Lisa Ferguson, delivered a victim impact statement in court. "What you are is the monster who killed him," she told Iwamasa, accusing him of knowingly preying on the actor's addiction to maintain a luxury lifestyle at Perry's expense.
Ferguson alleged Iwamasa repeatedly lied to the family, took photos as Perry's remains were being interred at his funeral, demanded three years of his $150,000 salary as severance, and sued the estate with a workers compensation claim.
Perry's stepfather, news anchor Keith Morrison, addressed Iwamasa in court. "You could have made the phone call," he said. "But you didn't because you were living a pretty dandy lifestyle. You were living like a king, in control of one of the most famous people in the world."
According to the coroner, Perry had three times the amount of ketamine typically used for anesthesia in his system when Iwamasa called 911 claiming he'd returned from errands to find the actor lifeless in the water. Ferguson suggested Iwamasa deliberately created an alibi to distance himself from the death.
When given the chance to speak, Iwamasa said he was "horribly sorry" and regretted his actions. He was the last of five co-defendants to be sentenced in the high-profile case.
