Kenneth Iwamasa was paid $150,000 to be Matthew Perry’s live-in personal assistant. Knowing the “Friends” star for decades, his job would eventually expand into an addiction enabler and de facto doctor, according to court filings.
Iwamasa was tasked with injecting his boss with ketamine, eventually with a dose that would prove fatal on Oct. 28, 2023. Iwamasa injected Perry before leaving to run errands, and when he returned, he found him dead in the jacuzzi.
Perry’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, said Iwamasa knew he could call any family member should Perry start making drug demands, and his job would be safe.
The former assistant was the first to reach a plea deal of the five people indicted in connection with Perry’s death. This week, he becomes the last one to be sentenced.
Prosecutors are asking for Iwamasa to serve three years and five months, which would be more than the sentence of the doctor who sold him the 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. That is virtually certain to lead to a lighter sentence.
“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.”
Perry’s mother wrote, “When he had killed my son, he kept a sharp eye on me. He sent me songs, he drew a little map to help me find my way around the cemetery. If he saw a rainbow — one of Matthew’s favorite things — he would call me. He insisted on speaking at Matthew’s funeral. He clung to me and the family as if he was somehow the good guy who tried to save Matthew.”
She said Iwamasa expected a financial payout, and when it was clear he wouldn’t get one, he threatened legal action.
Iwamasa did speak at the funeral, which would later leave the family disgusted.
