When Matthew Perry’s personal assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, was arrested earlier this month, the explanation provided by officials seemed iron-clad. After all, it was he who gave Perry multiple shots of ketamine the day he died of what medical examiners say was an overdose of the drug. But Rowena Chiu, who worked as an assistant to convicted sexual assailant Harvey Weinstein, says it’s not that simple.
According to a statement from the US Attorney’s Office, Central District of California, Perry’s 59-year-old, live-in assistant has “admitted to repeatedly injecting Perry with ketamine without medical training, including performing multiple injections on Perry on October 28, 2023 – the day Perry died” at age 54. According to a plea agreement Iwamasa made with prosecutors, Perry had instructed him to secure illicit doses of the powerful anesthetic in late September. By early October, Iwamasa was allegedly injecting the actor with the drug on a regular basis.
On the day of his death, Matthew Perry—who for years had been open about his struggle with substance use disorder—requested three shots of ketamine throughout the day. “Shoot me up with a big one,” Iwamasa said Perry told him before his last dose, then asked him to prepare the hot tub for use. A few hours later, Iwamasa discovered Perry unresponsive in that same hot tub. Perry’s autopsy report lists an overdose of ketamine as the primary cause of his death, and drowning as the secondary cause.
In a guest essay for the New York Times, Chiu argues that a toxic and problematic system is at least partially to blame for the situation that led to Iwamasa’s arrest. The personal assistant to Weinstein for two months in 1998, she publicly accused the former mogul of attempted rape nearly 20 years later. While in her professional role, she says, she got “firsthand insight into the toxic dynamic that can develop while assisting a celebrity or understand the inherent power imbalance that can arise,” even beyond her interactions with the notoriously problematic Weinstein.
“An assistant to a celebrity can be expected to do whatever is asked of them, regardless of ethics or legality,” Chiu makes clear. “These requests can range from telling white lies (to, say, an irate spouse wanting to know where your boss is) to procuring illicit indulgences (such as drugs).” In her experience, the alleged actions that led to multiple charges against Iwamasa were all in a day’s work.
And worse, she writes, he might have been led to believe that he would be shielded from any repercussions. “As a personal assistant, if you’re ever asked to do anything ethically dubious, you’re immediately reassured, as I was: Oh, don’t worry, you’ll never get into trouble,” after all, she writes, people powerful enough to hire a crew of assistants also have a legal team to step in in the assistant’s behalf.
That supposed safety net went away for Iwamasa when Perry died, Chiu argues, as “Mr. Perry (and his deep pockets) are no longer around to protect the assistant. Without that patronage, the legal system has come for him.”
Chiu isn’t the only person who says that Iwamasa should not be held to the same standard as, say, the doctors who allegedly provided the deadly drug. Iwamasa is “the least culpable in my opinion,” former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers Neama Rahmani tells People regarding his arrest. “I think he’s in the business of being an assistant … if your boss is a drug addict and you want to keep your job, maybe you might do it for that reason.”
Brian Daniel, who recently spoke to The Cut about his experience as an assistant to “ultrawealthy clients,” offers this general insight into how hard it is for assistants to set boundaries with their employers. “You get sucked in, and the water becomes very muddy. A lot of these people are lonely. They’re in their megamansion all alone with you, and then they’ve had a couple lines, and then they’re telling you all their problems, and you become like a psychiatrist. It’s tricky.”
That challenge to say “no” to a powerful boss might not matter, says Mark Chutkow, another former federal prosecutor. Iwamasa—who faces up to 15 years in prison—“was actually injecting this drug into Matthew Perry, so that makes him the most closely tied to what eventually happened.”
Chiu appears to worry that Chutkow is right. “I’m not surprised that Mr. Iwamasa pleaded guilty,” she writes.
“The assistant, who is usually invisible, is suddenly center stage, the last place he or she is equipped to be. Along with invisible, the assistant can also be penniless, powerless and a vulnerable target. It’s far too easy to turn the butler into the scapegoat.”
