Salvador Plasencia, a physician who pleaded guilty in July to multiple drug charges in connection to actor Matthew Perry’s death, was sentenced Wednesday to two and a half years in prison.
“I failed Mr. Perry — I failed him, I failed his family,” Plasencia said in court, according to the New York Times. He told Perry’s family in the courtroom: “I’m just so sorry.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, which prosecuted the case in Los Angeles, released a statementafter the sentence, quoting from a memorandum prosecutors filed earlier.
“Rather than do what was best for Mr. Perry – someone who had struggled with addiction for most of his life – [Plasencia] sought to exploit Perry’s medical vulnerability for profit,” it read.
In addition to his prison sentence, Plasencia is required to serve two years of supervised release and has to pay a fine of $5,600. Plasencia, an urgent care clinic operator known in court documents as Dr. P., was initially charged alongside four others in August 2024 following an investigation into the “Friends” actor’s fatal overdoseat age 54 the previous year. In exchange for the guilty plea to four counts of distributing ketamine, prosecutors dropped other charges against Plasencia, including falsifying medical records.
“He was a good doctor loved by those he treated. He is not a villain,” Plasencia’s lawyers, Karen L. Goldstein and Debra S. White, said in a statement after the sentencing. “He is someone who made serious mistakes in his treatment decisions involving the off-label use of ketamine, a drug commonly used for depression that does not have uniform standards. The mistakes he made over the 13 days during which he treated Mr. Perry will stay with him forever.”
Before Plasencia, 43, agreed to plead guilty, he was set for trial in August. As part of the plea deal, he surrendered his medical license in September. Plasencia was not accused of selling Perry the specific dose of ketamine that investigators believe killed the actor, but he admitted to selling large quantities of the drug to the actor.
Ahead of the doctor’s sentencing, prosecutors asked Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett to sentence Plasencia to three years in prison. Perry’s mother and stepfather, Suzanne and Keith Morrison, wrote a letter to the court, calling Plasencia “among the most culpable of all.”
“Here was a life so entwined with ours and held aloft sometimes with duct tape and bailing wire, with anything that might keep that big terrible thing from killing our first-born son, and our hearts with him,” the two wrote in the letter, according to Rolling Stone. “And then those greedy jackals come out of the dark, and all the effort is for naught; it all crashes down.”
The actor was known best for his role as Chandler Bing on “Friends,” an NBC sitcom that attained massive popularity in the 1990s and is still widely beloved. He also received Emmy nominations for roles on “The West Wing” and the TV movie “The Ron Clark Story,” while appearing in films like the crime comedy “The Whole Nine Yards” (2000) and “17 Again” (2009).
But Perry struggled with addiction throughout his career, by his own account. “You can track the trajectory of my addiction if you gauge my weight from season to season” he wrote in a memoir published the year before his death, recalling his time on “Friends”: “When I’m carrying weight, it’s alcohol. When I’m skinny, it’s pills.”
In October 2023, Perry was found dead in a hot tub at his home. The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office concluded the actor had died of the acute effects of ketamine, ruling the death an accident with no signs of foul play.
The death shocked Hollywood and much of the world, and prompted an investigation to find how Perry received the high dose of ketamine. Five people were ultimately charged in connection with the death, and all have pleaded guilty.
“Matthew Perry’s journey began with unscrupulous doctors who abused their position of trust because they saw him as a payday, to street dealers who gave him ketamine in unmarked vials,” said Drug Enforcement Administration administrator Anne Milgram in an August 2024 statement.
Plasencia was the first of the suspects to be sentenced. Jasveen Sangha, who pleaded guilty to five charges and admitted she sold the ketamine that resulted in Perry’s overdose death, is due to be sentenced Dec. 10.
Perry’s secondary physician Mark Chavez, the actor’s acquaintance Erik Fleming and his live-in assistant Kenneth Iwamasa all pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine in October 2024, and will be sentenced in the coming weeks.
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