New Delhi: Royalty, even the self-styled kind, doesn’t usually go to jail. For ‘Ketamine Queen’ Jasveen Sangha, however, the high life has landed her in jail.
Arrested two years ago in connection with the 2023 death by ketamine overdose of actor Matthew Perry, known worldwide for playing Chandler Bing in Friends, the 42-year-old of Indian origin has been sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty in September last year. Now infamously known as the ‘Ketamine Queen’, Sangha was one of five persons who pleaded guilty, and faced up to 65 years in prison. A plea bargain saved her from certain death behind bars, and federal prosecutors sought only a 15-year sentence even as her lawyers asked for supervised release after accounting for time served.
Prosecutors said Sangha agreed to plead guilty in September 2025 to one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, three counts of distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death or serious bodily injury.
She had originally been charged with nine counts, four of which were dropped as part of the plea agreement.
Sangha’s life is like a crash-and-burn script, featuring luxury cars, high fashion, top hotels and parties before it all came crashing down.
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‘Propah’ start
Sangha was born in London to Nilem Singh and Baljeet Singh Chhokar. Her grandparents, Budh and Harbhajan Singh were from Punjab, and had grown into fashion retail multimillionaires in East London who built a fortune supplying luxury department stores.
Following her mother’s remarriage, the family relocated to Calabasas, California, where Sangha spent much of her youth.
Just three when the move to the US happened, Sangha’s life had meandered to sunny California by the time she turned 10. A dual citizen of the United States and United Kingdom, Sangha graduated from high school at Calabasas in 2001.
Her senior yearbook message is mischievous, and in retrospect, ominous. “It isn’t what they say about you, it’s what they whisper,” the quote with her teenage mugshot says.
Sangha’s Instagram profile says she was a student at Calabasas High batch of 2001, earned a bachelor’s degree in social sciences at the University of California, Irvine, in 2005, and then an MBA from the Hult Business School in 2010.
She has worked as a curator and has interests in art, events and music.
I wear my shame “like a jacket”, Sangha said to Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett just before her sentencing. “These were not mistakes. They were horrible decisions,” she said, which “shattered people’s lives and the lives of their family and friends”.
Bling overdose
Sangha lived in North Hollywood, and on Instagram. She portrayed herself as a jet-setting curator of art and events, frequently travelling between London and Los Angeles. Her social media posts feature pools, dance parties, and high-end dinners, with appearances alongside celebrities like Charlie Sheen, DJ Khaled and Perla Hudson, the ex-wife of guitarist Slash. When Sangha turned 40, she celebrated in style, wearing a feathery pale pink dress with a matching cowboy hat and posting videos online.
Apparently unemployed since 2019, Sangha’s lifestyle did not slip one bit. She was seen driving a Range Rover sometimes and a BMW at others. Prior to that, she had been involved with Stiletto Nail Bar in Studio City, according to business records.
Sangha apparently had a neat racket going on the side: drugs. Ketamine was the main course on her psychedelic palette, a dissociative anaesthetic known to produce hallucinogenic affects.
Customers called her the ‘Ketamine Queen’. It’s no great coincidence then that Sangha learned of Perry’s interest in ketamine, according to court documents through an acquaintance linked to the actor’s personal assistant.
She offered to send a sample, describing her supply as “amazing,” and told the acquaintance, Erik Fleming, “Take one and try it, and I have more if he likes.”
Prosecutors alleged that Perry was not the first victim of this ‘queen’. Court documents state that one Cody McLaury died of an overdose in 2019, shortly after Sangha sold him ketamine. In her plea agreement, she admitted to selling McLaury four vials of the drug.
But there was no stopping. Despite this, prosecutors said Sangha continued to sell illegal drugs from her apartment for the next five years.
“For years…Sangha operated a high-volume drug trafficking business out of her North Hollywood residence,” prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum. “To cultivate her business, [Sangha] marketed herself as an exclusive dealer who catered to high-profile Hollywood clientele…While [Sangha] worked to expand and profit from her drug trafficking, she knew – and disregarded – the grave harm her conduct was causing.”
Sangha’s online presence was of the high kind too, and just wouldn’t come down. Weeks after Perry’s death, she was pictured having afternoon tea at a five-star hotel in Japan, wearing a kimono and taking mirror selfies. Months later, she posted highlights from a trip to Mexico, including eating caviar at an airport and relaxing by a poolside.
In another post, Sangha shared a photo of a bracelet with mushroom charms and the caption: “Pulling out old raver candy #ravetothegrave.” Prosecutors later wrote in a court filing that the hashtag was “a callous choice of words, considering that her actions have sent two victims to theirs,” suggesting she would “persist in her drug lifestyle until death”.
The New York Post reported prosecutors as saying that Sangha sold Perry 25 vials of ketamine, including the fatal dose, for $6,000 in cash just four days before his death.
The ‘enabler’
According to her plea agreement, Sangha worked with a middleman, the 55-year-old Fleming, to knowingly distribute ketamine to Perry, a successful actor and author whose struggles with drug addiction were well documented.
In October 2023, Sangha and Fleming sold Perry 51 vials of ketamine, which were provided to Kenneth Iwamasa, 60, of Toluca Lake, Perry’s live-in personal assistant, said a statement by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on 19 August 2025.
The vials were delivered to Iwamasa, who had no medical training. On 28 October, 2023, Iwamasa injected Perry with at least three shots of the ketamine supplied by Sangha. These injections “caused Perry’s death” at his Pacific Palisades home. Iwamasa had repeatedly injected Perry with the ketamine that Sangha supplied to Fleming.
Perry was found unconscious in a hot tub at his Los Angeles residence on 28 October 2023. Autopsy reports attributed his death to the acute effects of ketamine.
After learning of Perry’s death, Sangha called Fleming on the Signal app to discuss how to distance themselves from the death. That very day, Sangha updated the settings on the Signal apps to automatically delete her messages with Fleming. She further instructed Fleming to “delete all our messages”.
Two days after Perry’s death, Fleming left Sangha a voicemail on Signal and texted, “Please call…Got more info and want to bounce ideas off you. I’m 90 percent sure everyone is protected. I never dealt with [Perry]. Only his Assistant. So the Assistant was the enabler. Also they are doing a 3 month tox screening…Does K stay in your system or is it immediately flushed out[?].”
Sangha was arrested on drug charges the following March and released on bail. Her mother, Nilem Sangha, secured a $100,000 bond for her release.
Authorities raided her apartment and found thousands of pressed methamphetamine pills, 79 vials of liquid ketamine, MDMA (Ecstasy) tablets, counterfeit Xanax pills, baggies containing powdered ketamine and cocaine, and other drug trafficking items such as a gold money counting machine, a scale, a wireless signal and hidden camera detector, drug packaging materials, and $5,723 in cash.
Sangha also used her North Hollywood residence to store, package, and distribute narcotics, including ketamine and methamphetamine, since at least June 2019, said the statement.
By August 2024, criminal charges were filed against five individuals—including two doctors, Perry’s personal assistant, and two others—for providing ketamine to Perry. Jasveen Sangha was among those charged.
In December 2025, the two doctors accused, Salvador Plasencia and Mark Chavez, were sentenced. Plasencia received 30 months in prison, while Chavez was sentenced to three years of supervised release, including eight months of home detention. Both surrendered their medical licence. Iwamasa and Fleming are scheduled to be sentenced in the coming months. Each of them pleaded guilty in August 2024 to federal narcotics charges.
“I take full responsibility for my actions and the role I played in the events that led to this tragedy,” Sangha told The Sun, as reported by the New York Post.
Mrinalini Manda is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism, currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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