How Jasveen Sangha spiralled before Matthew Perry death

She was a woman who seemed to have it all: a privileged education, a good education, and a wide circle of friends.

But Jasveen Sangha had a dark secret that some of her closest friends say she kept from even them. The dual British-American national was a dealer to Hollywood’s rich and famous and ran a “stash house” of drugs including cocaine, Xanax, fake Adderall pills and ketamine.

His job and the illusion of his charmed life came to an abrupt end after a supply of 50 vials of ketamine were sold to Friends actor Matthew Perry, including the dose that led to his death from an overdose in 2023.

Now Sangha is among five people, including two doctors, who have pleaded guilty to charges in Perry’s death.

In February, Sangha will become the last defendant convicted in the case that uncovered an underground ketamine drug network in Los Angeles. He could face a maximum sentence of 65 years in federal prison.

Bill Bodner, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Los Angeles office at the time of Perry’s death, told the BBC that he was “a highly educated individual who decided to make a living by smuggling drugs and use the money from drug smuggling to fund this social media influencer personality.”

He said the Sangha was running “a sizeable drug trafficking operation catering to the Hollywood elite.”

Prosecutors said Perry took legally prescribed amounts of ketamine to treat depression, but then requested more than his doctors allowed.

Court documents related to the federal investigation show that this led him to multiple doctors and then to a dealer who obtained the drug for the Sangha through an intermediary.

His lawyer, Mark Geragos, said Sangha accepted responsibility but denied actually knowing Perry, best known for his role as Chandler Bing on the long-running sitcom Friends.

“He feels terrible. He’s felt terrible since day one,” Geragos told reporters after pleading guilty in the case. “This has been a terrible experience.”

Weeks before Perry’s death, Sangha spoke on the phone with his longtime friend Tony Marquez.

He and others spoke to the BBC as part of a study. Upcoming documentary on iPlayer examining the circumstances surrounding Perry’s death. This marks the first time the friends have opened up about the woman known worldwide as the Queen of Ketamine.

Sangha and Marquez had known each other since the 2010s, and Sangha said he had even met her family. Like Sangha, Marquez was a regular on the L.A. party circuit.

He has also faced drug-related legal issues and has been previously convicted of drug trafficking. But while the pair have a long history, he says there is no suggestion that the Sangha is in the deep sea.

Just a few months ago, his North Hollywood home, which prosecutors called a “stash house,” was raided by police.

Jash Negandhi attended the University of California, Irvine with Sangha in 2001 and they remained friends for over 20 years.

“He was very into the dance music scene,” Negandhi recalls. “She loved dancing and having a good time.”

Negandhi said he was stunned when his friend was revealed to be a drug dealer.

“I didn’t know anything,” he says. “Absolutely nothing. He didn’t talk about it.”

Of course, most of his friends assumed he didn’t need the money.

“He always had money,” Marquez says. “He traveled everywhere by private jet and that was before everything blew up.”

According to The Times, Sangha’s grandparents were East London fashion retail multimillionaires and entrepreneur Nilem Singh and Dr. Baljeet Singh Chhokar’s daughter Sangha would inherit the family fortune.

His mother remarried twice and moved to Calabasas, California, where Sangha grew up. According to Marquez, his family’s home in Los Angeles is “beautiful” and “big.”

“We’d have cookouts or pool parties at her parents’ house,” she says. “They were so caring, so loving, and treated us as if we were their children.”

After high school, Sangha spent time in London and graduated with an MBA from Hult International Business School in London in 2010. In the photos, he can be seen smiling sweetly at the camera in a smart black suit and straightened brown hair during a visit to the Financial Times in 2010.

“He didn’t look like a fraud,” says a former classmate. The Sangha was friendly, if somewhat aloof.

He wore designer clothes to class and enjoyed socializing. There were no rumors that he was involved in drugs. “If there was a user on Hult, we would probably know about it.”

He returned to Los Angeles shortly after completing his MBA. Sangha’s mother and stepfather operated KFC franchises in California and were sued by the company for more than $50,000 in 2013 for failing to pay the company royalties for use of the brand, according to court documents.

Sangha’s stepfather declared bankruptcy before the case was concluded. Although Sangha’s family was experiencing financial difficulties during this period, he did not disclose this to many people.

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” Negandhi says.

The Sangha appeared to want to achieve the entrepreneurial successes of their parents. She opened Stiletto Nail Bar, a short-lived nail salon, and talked to friends about her ambitions, such as owning a restaurant franchise.

But his main interest seemed to be going to clubs. According to Marquez, he had a close-knit circle of friends in Los Angeles called “Kitties”, a group of mostly female friends who liked to throw parties attended by celebrities.

They would often meet at the Avalon, a historic theater in the heart of Hollywood that hosts concerts and electronic music events, and party until the early hours of the morning.

He says they will take pills and ketamine. The parties they held throughout California sometimes lasted for days.

“We would take a trip to Lake Havasu, rent a big old mansion, bring our DJs and all our sound systems, and every night would be a theme night where it would just be us,” Marquez says of the lake on the border of California and Arizona.

“We’d dress up and have a white party, a glittery party. We’d have a mushroom-mushroom party.”

These parties “always contained ketamine,” he says. But although Sangha had many nicknames within this group of friends, no one knew her as the “Queen of Ketamine.”

“Nobody called him that,” Marquez says.

The group was concerned that the illicit drug supply was being contaminated with the deadly opioid fentanyl and so resorted to extraordinary efforts to procure large quantities of high-quality ketamine.

“If we were going to make ketamine, we wanted to get it from the source,” Marquez says.

The friends allegedly used couriers to travel to Mexico to pick up medication used as a sedative during surgery from corrupt veterinarians and border pharmacies.

“I didn’t know Jasveen was doing this,” Marquez says. “But did we have access? Did we have people doing it? Yes.”

Marquez claims he never suspected the Sangha of drug dealing: “It’s shocking, I tell you.”

“I’ve known this person for years. I know his family. I know how he acts, I know what he’s capable of. I know where he’s coming from. To this day, I still can’t believe this happened,” he says.

Looking back, Marquez suspects that Sangha was “addicted” to the social status that came with being a drug dealer to the rich and famous.

“I truly believe Jasveen is addicted to the life of dealing with celebrities,” he says.

“He was addicted to being in that social circle and being sought out by celebrities that people had seen on TV their whole lives.”

He said he believed he was never a “king badge” or a big-time dealer, but got into it because “he loved doing ketamine, just like the rest of us.”

But the Sangha’s actions indicate a more brutal streak.

Prosecutors said Sangha sold ketamine to a man named Cody McLaury in 2019.

McLaury overdosed and died. Following his death, his sister texted Sangha to inform him that the drugs he sold to her brother had killed him.

“At this point, any sane person would have gone to law enforcement, and certainly any person with any heart would have stopped their activities and not distributed ketamine to others,” says Martin Estrada, the former attorney general for the Central District of California who announced federal charges against Sangha in August 2024.

“He continued to do this, and several years later we found that his continued behavior resulted in the death of another person, Mr. Perry.”

Another friend from a different background who went to clubs with Sangha in the 2010s recalls being similarly surprised by the news.

He told the BBC that he had known Sangha since high school and socialized extensively with him at the same time as Marquez.

The friend asked to remain anonymous so she could speak candidly about the woman she knew who is now “accused of being a drug lord.”

“We were always partying, like every night. For many years,” he says. “He didn’t offer me anything.”

He remembers the Sangha taking his uncle, Paul Sing, with him almost everywhere he went. “This isn’t actually drug lord behavior,” he says. “[And] It wasn’t like she let him come after her. “He always dressed fashionably.”

Paul Sing appeared in event photographs with the Sangha and was present in court at his guilty plea hearing on September 3.

In the 2020s, according to Marquez, Sangha participated in rehabilitation. In court filings last month, his attorney, Mark Geragos, claimed he had been sober for 17 months. In his last meeting with Negandhi, they talked about the future.

“We were both in our 40s, and when you get to that age you tend to self-evaluate. And now that we’re that age, you start thinking about what do we want to do?” he says.

“He had been excited about being clean for a long time and was looking forward to many things in life.”

Sangha did not mention his recent arrest.

“I had no idea that he was going through all of this when we were talking,” he says. “He didn’t explain any of it.”