Matthew Perry’s heartbroken sister, Madeline Morrison, has lashed out at his former assistant, claiming he ‘repeatedly’ injected the Friends star with ketamine before his death
Matthew Perry’s sister claimed the late star’s assistant “repeatedly” injected him with ketamine before his death. The late Friends star, who died in October 2023, paid Kenneth ‘Kenny’ Iwamasa $150,000 a year to be his live-in personal assistant.
His role for the actor would expand to drug messenger, addiction enabler and de facto doctor, according to court filings. Iwamasa injected Perry with the doses of ketamine that would prove fatal on Oct. 28, 2023, and then left the actor to run errands. He returned to find Perry dead in the Jacuzzi.
Today, Iwamasa will be the last person to be sentenced in connection with Perry’s death. Prosecutors are asking for a prison term of three years and five months. That’s more than the 2 1/2-year sentence of the doctor who sold Iwamasa ketamine and taught him to inject it into Perry, but far less than the 15-year sentence of the admitted drug dealer who sold Iwamasa the final doses.
Iwamasa, 60, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ketamine resulting in death and became the case’s most important witness in the indictments of his four co-defendants. But in a victim impact statement, Matthew’s sister, Madeline, slammed his former assistant.
She said: “He had injected my brother with a lethal dose of ketamine and left him in a hot tub to die. It is difficult to put into words the sense of betrayal I felt when I found out what Kenny had done.”
The LA County Medical Examiner found that ketamine, a surgical anaesthetic that has become widely used for other purposes, both legal and illegal, was the primary cause of Perry’s death. Drowning was a secondary cause. On the day of Perry’s death, Iwamasa gave police a list of all the medications Perry was taking, but he left off ketamine and said nothing about the injections, prosecutors said.
After investigators served a search warrant on the house in January 2024, the situation began to change, and he would slowly admit his role in Perry’s death. Iwamasa said he had been giving Perry six to eight injections of ketamine per day in the last days of his life, and that Perry had told him: “Shoot me up with a big one” on the day he died.
Iwamasa said he had worked with middleman Erik Fleming, who was sentenced to two years in prison on May 13, to get drugs from dealer Jasveen Sangha.
In his first text to Fleming, Iwamasa said: “Alfred here batmans butler. He said I can text you directly.” According to Page Six, Iwamasa allegedly lied to Matthew’s relatives about what actually happened on the day the Hollywood star died. Madeline added in her statement: “It felt like my brother died all over again. Everything I believed about the day he died—everything Kenny told us—was a lie. I had to relive Matthew’s death from an entirely new and devastating perspective.”
“I have no sympathy for Kenny Iwamasa,” Perry’s younger sister, Caitlin Morrison, wrote in a letter to the judge. “I wasn’t there the night my brother died. I cannot read Kenny’s thoughts. I will never know if the lethal dose of ketamine was only lethal by accident. But I know that when Kenny left the house, he was doing one of two things. He was either escaping from something he knew he had done or he was willfully abandoning a vulnerable person in a dangerous situation.”
Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, wrote that her son and the family had known Iwamasa for decades, and that relatives were relieved when Perry, who’d had recurring struggles with addiction throughout his life, hired the assistant in 2022. “Mathew trusted Kenny. We trusted Kenny. Kenny’s most important job — by far — was to be my son’s companion and guardian in his fight against addiction,” she wrote. “We trusted a man without a conscience, and my son paid the price.”
Iwamasa’s lawyers argued that he was an employee doing the bidding of his boss. In a presentencing filing, they said Iwamasa had “a particular vulnerability to the relationship dynamic which he fell into with the victim. In short, he could not ‘simply say no.’ That inability had tragic consequences.”
Suzanne Morrison said Iwamasa knew he could call any family member should Perry start making drug demands, and his job would be safe. “He was my Matso, my Manew,” his mother wrote. “He was, in spite of all we went through, my heart and my soul.” Iwamasa pleaded guilty in August 2024 before the case became public. Today will be his first court appearance since.
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