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Erik Fleming, who is a drug counselor, will do two years behind bars for procuring the fatal doses of ketamine that killed Perry on Oct. 28, 2023
Michele McPhee
There were a coterie of bad actors who preyed on Matthew Perry’s history of addiction. Two dirty doctors, physicians Salvador Plasencia and Mark Chavez, will serve time for selling the drug to the actor. His live-in sober companion and longtime assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa.
And his friend Erik Fleming, a former Hollywood producer turned licensed California drug counselor, who acted as the “middle man,” prosecutors say, between Perry and the drug dealer known as the “Ketamine Queen,” Jasveen Sangha.
On Wednesday, Fleming, 56, was sentenced to two years behind bars by a federal judge after admitting that he sold 51 vials of ketamine to Perry in October 2023, “including,” prosecutors noted in a sentencing memo, “the ketamine that caused Mr. Perry’s death.” His sentence also includes three years of supervised release and a special assessment of $200.
“As a certified drug counselor and addict, I knew it was illegal and wrong to distribute black market drugs. I had met Matt a few times and knew about his struggles with substance abuse,” Fleming wrote in a letter to the court before he was hit with the two-year sentence. “I should never have agreed to acquire ketamine for Matt.”
Fleming, while employed as a drug counselor, negotiated with Iwamasa before Perry’s death with the live-in assistant asking: “How much do you want per bottle and what is the nice tip you want[?]” Fleming responded that he needed money up front and vouched for her product, texting, “She only deal[s] with high end and celebs. If it were not great
stuff she’d lose her business,” adding: “I wouldn’t do it if there wasn’t a chance of me making some money for doing this.”
The drug counselor, who had been employed at a variety of treatment center at the time, prosecutors say, then reached out to Sangha on an encrypted app to negotiate the drug deal, according to court records despite, prosecutor noted in a sentencing memo, being “acutely aware of the dangers of drug abuse, as he was professionally responsible for helping others overcome and fight their addiction.”
In a defense sentencing memo, Fleming argued he didn’t make a lot of money in his short-lived drug dealing enterprise, which will now send him to prison for 24 months. In it, lawyers describe “three transactions taking place over 11 days involving quantities of ketamine intended for a single person, where Mr. Fleming pocketed a total of approximately $2,000.”
Fleming told the court he had been a successful “executive producer, showrunner, and director for shows like Switched, Texas Cheer Moms, and The Psychic Next Door. I produced the pilot episode of multiple shows including Salon Confidential, The John
Walsh Show, and Beverly Hills Buddha. I had a wide business network and felt optimistic
about my future prospects.”
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That was before, he said, he began smoking crack in 2007. He got sober about a decade later, he wrote, and began to work in a variety of treatment centers. Last month, the ketamine queen was sentenced to 15 years behind bars.
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