A WOMAN BRANDED the “Ketamine Queen” pleaded guilty today to selling Friends star Matthew Perry the drug that killed him.

Jasveen Sangha pleaded guilty to five federal charges, including providing the ketamine that led to Perry’s death.

Her trial had been planned to start later this month. She is the fifth and final defendant charged in Perry’s overdose death to admit guilt.

Perry’s mother, Suzanne Perry, and his stepfather, Dateline reporter Keith Morrison, sat in the audience. It was their first time attending court proceedings since the announcement of the indictments one year ago.

Wearing tan jail garb, Sangha stood in court on Wednesday next to her lawyer, Mark Geragos, as she repeated “guilty” five times as US district court judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett asked for her pleas.

Before that she answered “yes, your honour” to dozens of procedural questions, hedging slightly when the judge asked if she knew the drugs she was giving to co-defendant and middleman Erik Fleming were going to Perry.

“There was no way I could tell 100%,” she said. She later added, to a similar question on vials of ketamine she gave to Fleming, that “I didn’t know if all of them or some of them” were bound for Perry. The comments did not affect her plea agreement.

Prosecutors had cast Sangha, a 42-year-old dual citizen of the US and the UK, as a prolific drug dealer who was known to her customers as the “Ketamine Queen”, using the term often in press releases and court documents.

Making good on a deal she signed on August 18, Sangha pleaded guilty to one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, three counts of distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death.

Prosecutors agreed to drop three other counts related to the distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of methamphetamine that was unrelated to the Perry case.

The final plea deal came a year after federal prosecutors announced that five people had been charged in Perry’s October 28 2023 death after a sweeping investigation.

A judge will schedule sentencing for Sangha. She could get up to 65 years in prison.

The judge is not bound to follow any terms of the plea agreement, but prosecutors said in the document that they will ask for less than the maximum. None of the co-defendants have been sentenced yet.

Sangha and Dr Salvador Plasencia, who pleaded guilty in July, had been the primary targets of the investigation.

Three other defendants: Dr Mark Chavez, Kenneth Iwamasa; and Erik Fleming; pleaded guilty in exchange for their co-operation, which included statements implicating Sangha and Plasencia.

Perry was found dead in his Los Angeles home by Iwamasa, his assistant.

The medical examiner ruled that ketamine, typically used as a surgical anaesthetic, was the primary cause of death.