Courtesy of ZancShe was a woman who seemed to have it all: a privileged upbringing, a good education, and a wide circle of friends.
But Jasveen Sangha had a dark secret that some of his closest friends say he hid even from them. The British-American national was a trafficker to Hollywood’s rich and famous, who ran a “stash” of drugs including cocaine, Xanax, fake Adderall pills and ketamine.
His business – and the illusion of his charmed life – came to an abrupt end after supplying 50 vials of ketamine that were eventually sold to Friends actor Matthew Perry, including the dose that caused his overdose death in 2023.
Now, Sangha is among five other people, including two doctors, who have pleaded guilty to crimes related to Perry’s death.
In February, Sangha will be the latest defendant sentenced in the case, which uncovered an underground ketamine drug ring in Los Angeles. He could face a maximum of 65 years in federal prison.
Bill Bodner, special agent in charge of the Los Angeles office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at the time of Perry’s death, told the BBC that she was “a highly educated person who decided to make a living trafficking drugs and use that money from drug trafficking to fund this social media influencer.”
He said Sangha was running a “somewhat large drug trafficking operation that catered to the Hollywood elite.”
Prosecutors have noted that Perry was taking legal amounts of ketamine prescribed to treat depression, but then began wanting more than his doctors would allow.
Court documents related to the federal investigation show she took him to several doctors and then to a dealer who obtained the medication for Sangha through a middleman.
His lawyer, Mark Geragos, has said Sangha takes responsibility but has denied that he actually knew Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing on the long-running sitcom Friends.
“He feels horrible. He’s felt horrible from day one,” Geragos told reporters after pleading guilty in the case. “This has been a horrible experience.”
But how did Sangha handle his double life?
Weeks before Perry’s death, Sangha spoke by phone with his old friend Tony Marquez.
He and others spoke to the BBC, as part of an upcoming documentary on iPlayer looking at the circumstances surrounding Perry’s death. It is the first time the friends have spoken openly about the woman who has become known worldwide as the Queen of Ketamine.
Sangha and Márquez had known each other since the 2010s and he said he had even met her family. Like Sangha, Márquez was also a regular on the Los Angeles party circuit.
He has also faced drug legal problems and has a prior conviction for drug trafficking. But while the two shared a long history, he says Sangha never hinted that he was in deep water.
Just a few months earlier, police had raided his North Hollywood home, which prosecutors called a “hideout.”
Jash Negandhi attended UC Irvine with Sangha in 2001 and they have remained friends for over 20 years.
“I was very interested in the dance music scene,” Negandhi recalls. “He loved to dance and have a good time.”
Negandhi said he was shocked by the revelation that his friend was a drug dealer.
“I didn’t know anything,” he says. “Absolutely nothing. She hadn’t talked about it.”
Certainly, most of her friends assumed that she didn’t need the money.
“She always had money,” Márquez says. “He traveled everywhere by private jet and did it like this before everything blew up.”
Sangha’s grandparents were fashion retail billionaires in east London, according to The Times, and Sangha, the daughter of businessman Nilem Singh and Dr. Baljeet Singh Chhokar, would inherit the family wealth.
His mother remarried twice and moved to Calabasas in California, where Sangha grew up. Their family home in Los Angeles is “beautiful” and “big,” according to Márquez.
“We’d have cookouts or a pool party at his parents’ house,” he says. “They are very loving, very affectionate and they treated us as if we were their children.”
Sangha spent time in London after high school and graduated with an MBA from Hult International Business School in London in 2010. In the pictures, she 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.
“She didn’t seem like a scammer,” notes a former classmate. Sangha was friendly, if somewhat distant.
He went to class in designer clothes and liked to socialize. There were no rumors of drug involvement. “If she was a Hult user, we’d probably know.”
He returned to Los Angeles shortly after completing his MBA. Sangha’s mother and stepfather owned KFC franchises in California and were sued by the company for more than $50,000 in 2013, court documents show, for failing to pay royalties to the company for use of its brand.
Sangha’s stepfather declared bankruptcy before the case was over. However, if Sangha’s family was experiencing financial difficulties during this period, she did not reveal it to many people.
“I didn’t hear anything about that,” Negandhi says.
Sangha seemed to want to catch up with his parents’ business achievements. She opened a short-lived nail salon, Stiletto Nail Bar, and talked to friends about her ambitions, including owning a restaurant franchise.
Drug fueled parties that lasted for days
But his real interest seemed to be clubbing. In Los Angeles, she had a close-knit circle of friends called “Kitties,” according to Márquez, which was a group of mostly female friends who liked to throw parties, which were attended by celebrities.
They often gathered at the Avalon, a historic theater in the heart of Hollywood that hosts concerts and electronic music events, and partied into the early hours of the morning.
He says they would take pills and ketamine. Sometimes their parties, which they celebrated throughout California, lasted for days.
“We would take a trip to Lake Havasu, rent a big old mansion and bring our DJs, all our sound systems, and every night would be a theme night with just us,” Marquez says of the lake, which borders California and Arizona.
“We would dress up and have a white party, a sparkly party. We had a mushroom party.”
These parties “always involved ketamine,” he says. But although Sangha had many nicknames within this group of friends, no one knew her as “The Ketamine Queen.”
“No one called her that,” says Márquez.
The group was concerned about contamination of the illegal drug supply with the deadly opioid fentanyl and therefore went to great lengths to obtain large quantities of high-quality ketamine.
“If we were going to use ketamine, we wanted to get it from the source,” Márquez says.
The friends allegedly used couriers to go to Mexico to retrieve the medication, which is used as a sedative during surgeries, from corrupt veterinarians and pharmacies across the border.
“I wouldn’t know Jasveen would have done that,” Marquez says. “But did we have access? Did we have people to do it? Yes.”
Márquez affirms that he never suspected that Sangha was trafficking drugs on the side: “It’s shocking, I assure you.”
“I’ve known this person for years. I know his family. I know the way he acts, I know what he’s capable of. I know where he comes from. I can’t, to this day, believe this is happening,” he says.
Looking back, Márquez suspects that Sangha became “addicted” to the social status that comes with being a drug dealer for the rich and famous.
“I really think Jasveen was addicted to that life of dealing with celebrities,” he says.
“I was addicted to being in that social circle and being sought out by celebrities that people have seen all their lives on television.”
He said he believes she was never a “key person” or a big dealer, but simply fell into the business because “she loved doing ketamine, like all of us.”
However, Sangha’s actions suggest a more ruthless streak.
Prosecutors have said that in 2019, Sangha sold ketamine to a man named Cody McLaury.
McLaury overdosed and died. After his death, his sister texted Sangha to tell him that the drugs he had sold to her brother had killed him.
“At that point, any sensible person would have gone to the authorities, and certainly anyone with anything resembling a heart would stop their activities and not distribute any more ketamine to others,” says Martín Estrada, former chief prosecutor for the Central District of California, who announced federal charges against Sangha in August 2024.
“She continued to do this and we saw, several years later, that her continued conduct resulted in the death of yet another person, Mr. Perry.”
Another friend from a different circle who used to go clubbing with Sangha in the 2010s remembers being similarly shocked by the news.
He told the BBC that he had known Sangha since high school and socialized with her a lot at the same time as Márquez.
The friend did not want to give his name, so he could speak candidly about the woman he knew who is now “being accused of being a drug dealer.”
“We were always at parties, like every night. For many, many years,” he says. “She never offered me anything.”
She remembers that Sangha took her uncle Paul Sing with her almost everywhere she went. “It’s not really the behavior of a drug dealer,” he says. “[And] It wasn’t like she had just let him tag along. “He was always dressed in fashion.”
Paul Sing appears in photographs of the event with Sangha and was present in court to hear her plead guilty on September 3.
At some point in the 2020s, Sangha attended rehab, according to Márquez. In court papers last month, her attorney Mark Geragos claimed she had been sober for 17 months. In his last conversation with Negandhi, they talked about the future.
“We were both in our 40s and you tend to self-evaluate when we get to that age. And you start to think, what do we want to do now that we’ve reached this age?” he says.
“I was very excited to be clean for quite some time and was looking forward to a lot of things in life.”
Sangha did not mention that she had recently been arrested.
“I had no idea she was going through all this when we were talking,” he says. “She hadn’t revealed any of that.”
