Matthew Perry’s Sisters Slam Late Actor’s Assistant Ahead of Sentencing: ‘Left Him in a Hot Tub to Die’

For the family of Friends icon Matthew Perry, the grief of losing him unexpectedly has been unbearable. Then they discovered the person they trusted most had been lying to them all along.

Perry died on October 28, 2023 at 54. Kenneth Iwamasa, Perry’s assistant and friend of 25 years, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death and admitted to repeatedly injecting the Friends star with drugs, including on the day he died, per the Department of Justice. He faces sentencing on Wednesday, May 27, and prosecutors are pushing for 41 months behind bars, as reported by The New York Times.

The actor’s mother, Suzanne Morrison, and half-sisters, Caitlin and Madeline Morrison, filed heartbreaking and intense victim impact statements to the judge.

Caitlin and Madeline are the daughters of Suzanne and Dateline NBC correspondent Keith Morrison.

Madeline didn’t hold back. “It is difficult to put into words the sense of betrayal I felt when I found out what Kenny had done,” she wrote, according to the statement obtained by the National Enquirer. “The idea that someone my brother considered family could betray him in such an unimaginable way is something I never could have conceived.”

“In many ways, it felt like my brother died all over again,” she continued. “Everything I believed about the day he died — everything Kenny told us — was a lie. I had to relive Matthew’s death from an entirely new and devastating perspective.”

In her statement, Madeline added that it’s now “painfully clear” Iwamasa was covering his tracks.

“He repeatedly volunteered his version of events without being asked, as if he were being interviewed rather than mourning a friend,” she wrote. “In reality, he was trying to distract us from the truth: that he had injected my brother with a lethal dose of ketamine and left him in a hot tub to die.”

Iwamasa also spoke at his late boss’s funeral, which Madeline now calls “like a cruel joke I still struggle with.”

She placed more blame on Iwamasa than the drug dealer who supplied the ketamine, calling him “the so-called loyal assistant who bought the drugs by any means necessary, injected [Perry] with a lethal dose, and left him to die.”

Caitlin, who also serves as the executive director of Matthew Perry House, was equally direct in expressing her heartbreak.

“Until now, the defendants in this case have been suppliers — people willing to risk lives and exploit people living with substance use disorder for their own financial gain. I almost feel bad for them,” she wrote.

“I have no sympathy for Kenny Iwamasa. I will never know if the lethal dose of ketamine was only lethal by accident,” she continued.

“But I know that when Kenny left the house, he was doing one of two things. He was either escaping from something he knew he had done or he was willfully abandoning a vulnerable person in a dangerous situation,” she wrote.

Suzanne also thanked investigators in her statement. She wrote, “And I have to say this: the word ‘closure.’ Such a thing doesn’t exist. Ask any mother whose child has been torn away so mercilessly. Nothing takes this pain away, nor will it, I am sure, for as long as I live.”