LOS ANGELES — The final chapter in the death of Matthew Perry closed in a federal courtroom on May 27, 2026, when a 61-year-old man was sentenced to 41 months in prison for the injections that killed the actor, ending a two-and-a-half-year investigation that laid bare a network of enablers who profited from a man’s lifelong battle with addiction.

Kenneth Iwamasa, Perry’s live-in personal assistant of more than 30 years, stood before the judge as the last defendant to be sentenced in a case that produced five convictions and revealed in stark, prosecutorial detail the chaos inside Perry’s Pacific Palisades home in the final days of his life.

“You were the last person to see him alive,” the judge told Iwamasa, according to court records. “You found him dead. You cleaned up the scene and lied to the police.”

The sentencing brought a measure of legal closure to a story that has haunted Perry’s family, his Friends co-stars, and millions of fans since the actor was found unresponsive in his hot tub on October 28, 2023. He was 54 years old.

Jennifer Aniston, who has spoken more openly than any of her castmates about Perry’s death, has described the loss in terms that resist tidy resolution. In a November 2025 interview, she said the Friends family had been mourning Perry long before he died.

“We miss him,” she said, her voice breaking. “We miss him all the time.”

Aniston’s grief has been public and precise. She posted a tribute two weeks after his death, calling him “Matty” and sharing the last text message he sent her, which she said was “saying it all.” She told Variety that she hoped people would remember him not as Chandler Bing, but as a man who fought something enormous and helped others fight it too.

In an August 2025 Vanity Fair cover story, Aniston said something that many families of people lost to addiction recognize but rarely say aloud. “There’s a part of me that thinks this is better,” she said. “I’m glad he’s out of that pain.”

That sentence, raw and unguarded, captures the particular grief of watching someone you love be destroyed slowly over decades. The death, when it comes, carries inside it a terrible relief.

Perry was born on August 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother, Suzanne Morrison, moved with him to Ottawa, 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, Perry drank a full bottle of wine called Baby Duck. He lay in the grass, looked up at the sky, and felt something he would spend the rest of his life trying to get back. “I thought to myself, this is probably what normal people feel like all the time,” he later told a television audience.

That difference — so small, so invisible, so total — was the beginning of everything that followed.

He moved to Los Angeles in his late teens. He nearly lost the role of Chandler Bing to his friend Craig Bierko, who was offered Friends and chose another show instead. Perry walked into the audition and did it the way he had always done it, with the specific, slightly wounded rhythm of speech that made you feel the person talking had just thought of something terrible and was working very hard not to say it.

They hired him on the spot. He was the last actor cast, in September 1994. By the time the show ended 10 years later, he was one of the most famous people on Earth.

Friends was not simply a successful television show. It was a cultural phenomenon that became part of the furniture of people’s lives, 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 all of it simply 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 a timing that actors who have studied comedy for decades still struggle to understand.

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. Cross to the bookshelf. Put your hand on the table.

Don’t let anyone see. He was hungover on camera in front of 30 million people, and nobody knew.

Jennifer Aniston knew. She was the first one to tell him.

She came to his trailer. She sat down. She said, “I know you’re drinking.”

He said, “How can you tell?” He thought he had hidden it. She said, “We can smell it.”

The plural hit him like a sledgehammer. We. Not just her.

All of them. They had known. They had said nothing until she could not say nothing anymore.

Perry 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 and trying to figure out how to reach him. Aniston later confirmed she had reached out to him more than anyone else during the dark periods. Perry confirmed it too, 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.

He wrote about going to open houses on Sunday afternoons, walking through strangers’ homes, looking in the medicine cabinet, stealing whatever pills he found because he needed that many, that regularly, to avoid withdrawal.

He wrote about lying in a hospital bed for five months after his colon exploded from drug use in 2018, about being put on an ECMO machine, a device doctors privately call the Hail Mary because almost nobody survives it. There were five people on ECMO machines that night. The other four died.

Perry’s parents were told their son 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 published his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, in October 2022, almost exactly one year before he died.

He described writing the book as cathartic. Getting the terrible things down on the page felt like cleansing. But reading it back, he said, was almost impossible.

He had to sleep in a different room. He disassociated while recording the audiobook, looking at pages he had written and thinking this person had the most torturous life — and then realizing it was him.

The best part about the book, he said at a Toronto event in November 2023, was hearing from people it had helped. Five people had contacted him after reading it and checked into treatment. He stood at the podium and said that was worth every word.

“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 in that room had no way of knowing he had 11 days left.

He was texting Aniston on the morning of October 28, 2023. She said later 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, 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.

Matthew Perry died alone in the water.

The investigation that followed took two and a half years and resulted in five convictions. The picture that emerged from federal prosecutors was not one of a single catastrophic decision. It was a network of people each making their own calculations, each finding their own justification, each contributing to the machinery that ended Perry’s life.

There were two doctors. Dr. Mark Chavez and Dr.

Salvador Plasencia had been supplying Perry with ketamine, a surgical anesthetic sometimes used legally and effectively for depression, which is what Perry had initially been prescribed it for. The legal prescriptions were not enough. Perry wanted more than his doctors would give him.

Plasencia saw an opportunity. In a text message sent in September 2023, he wrote, “I wonder how much this will pay.” He charged Perry $2,000 per vial of ketamine.

The going price was approximately $15. He and Chavez sold Perry around 20 vials in exchange 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 of ketamine for Iwamasa to administer.

Plasencia told another patient in mid-October 2023 that Perry was spiraling out of control with his addiction. 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 and began looking for cheaper supply, 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 Perry since 1992, more than 30 years. 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 had no medical training.

He was a man who had known Matthew Perry for three decades and who, instead of being the person who kept 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 and drugs Perry had been prescribed. Ketamine was not on the list.

He also told prosecutors that in the days after Perry’s death, he had gone 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.

At his sentencing, Iwamasa’s attorneys said he had cared tremendously for Perry and would always carry the weight of what happened. The judge was unmoved.

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.

They believed he understood Matthew’s battle.

“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, 2026, and watched the last sentencing in the case against the people who had killed her son.

The five remaining cast members — 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. It was the right call. Grief of that specific kind does not resolve into statements quickly.

LeBlanc posted a personal tribute on Instagram. Cox, among the closest to Perry on set and in life, was the most private. Kudrow and Schwimmer gave themselves time.

They were processing something that had no clean edges, because the loss had not begun on October 28. It had begun years earlier. Every time the phone rang with bad news.

Every time a relapse was confirmed. Every time the word sobriety appeared and then disappeared again.

Aniston has been the most willing of the five to speak about Perry in the years since his death. She has done it with the particular combination of love and honesty that characterized her friendship with him while he was alive — the same quality that made her the one who finally walked into his trailer and said the thing that needed to be said.

The Friends reunion in 2021, the HBO special that brought them back to the original set for the first time in 17 years, was the last time all six were together. None of them knew it at the time. Aniston has called it a final curtain call.

Perry appeared on that stage already diminished, already showing the wear of everything the previous years had done to him, and still funny, still sharp, still unmistakably himself. The audience could see something was different, but they could also see Chandler, and they laughed.

He wanted to be remembered for the work he did with people struggling with addiction. He said so at every opportunity — in the book, in the interviews, on the stages where he stood and told the truth about his life. He wanted that to be the first thing mentioned.

Whether it will be is still uncertain. The name Chandler Bing is simply too large, too permanently lodged in the culture to be easily displaced.

But the case that concluded on May 27, 2026, has done something to the story of Matthew Perry that no memorial could. It has put on the public record, in the language of federal criminal proceedings, the specific names and specific decisions of the people who were in the room at the end. It has made the final chapter of his life legible in a way that grief alone cannot.

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.

He just needed more time to keep doing it.

The disease did not give him more time. It never does.