Matthew Perry’s greatest performance wasn’t on ‘Friends’.
It was as a newly sober good guy who just wanted to help others get clean.
As per claims exclusively reported by Alison Boshoff for the Mail, the real Matthew Perry was a monster.
In the later years of his life, sources say, he violently assaulted women. He was past 50 years old, cheating on his then-fiancée Molly Hurwitz with young women — one only 19 — who he met on the exclusive dating-app Raya.
He was capable of great cruelty while holding himself up as a paragon of virtue.
He sold the world, but most crucially other struggling addicts, a pack of lies.
Here was Perry describing his ‘best friend’, his assistant and sober companion of ten years who he pseudonymously named ‘Erin’, in his bestselling memoir: ‘the single nicest person in the world’.
Matthew Perry’s greatest performance wasn’t on ‘Friends’. It was as a newly sober good guy who just wanted to help others get clean.
As per claims exclusively reported by Alison Boshoff for the Mail, the real Matthew Perry was a monster. In the later years of his life, sources say, he violently assaulted women. He was past 50 years old, cheating on his then-fiancée Molly Hurwitz (pictured) with young women who he met on the exclusive dating-app Raya.
He was capable of great cruelty while holding himself up as a paragon of virtue. He sold the world, but most crucially other struggling addicts, a pack of lies. (Pictured: Perry with live-in sober companion Morgan Moses who he assaulted).
He wrote that ‘Erin’ was by his bedside every night for five months while he was at his lowest, recovering from intestinal surgery and left with a colostomy bag: ‘She became my best friend… [she] would come to know my struggles better than any doctor I’d ever seen’.
‘Erin’, as Boshoff also revealed, was Morgan Moses, who quit working for Perry in 2021 after he is said to have shoved her into a wall and thrown her ‘onto a bed’.
Moses subsequently cut off all contact with Perry. Little wonder why.
A younger woman, a subordinate, forced onto a bed by her older, wealthy, famous, powerful and well-protected boss — to my mind, the implications are clear.
That June, Perry is also said to have hurled a coffee table at his ex-fiancée Molly Hurwitz after she had dared to break up with him.
She had caught him texting much younger women on dating apps, even buying a Valentine’s gift for one of them.
‘He… told [Molly] she was crazy’, a source said. ‘He hated that she dumped him’.
How will Hollywood choose to remember Perry now? With awards season underway, one wonders: Will Perry be given the halo treatment, included on the ‘In Memoriam’ segment at the Oscars?
Or will we have an honest reckoning with who Perry was, the lies that he told, his alleged abhorrent treatment of women — without using his addictions as an excuse?
Without insisting he was something it now appears he was not?
In hindsight, it makes sense why the surviving ‘Friends’ cast didn’t take to Instagram on their own but waited until two days after Perry’s death to issue a locked-and-loaded joint statement.
Perry’s legacy isn’t just Perry’s. It belongs to ‘Friends’ as well, that last wholesome sitcom of the ’90s monoculture, one that may never be perceived the same way again.
Morgan Moses quit working for Perry in 2021 after he is said to have shoved her into a wall and thrown her ‘onto a bed’. Moses subsequently cut off all contact with Perry. Little wonder why. A younger woman, a subordinate, forced onto a bed by her older, wealthy, famous, powerful and well-protected boss – to my mind, the implications are clear.
How will Hollywood choose to remember Perry now? With awards season underway, one wonders: Will Perry be given the halo treatment, included on the ‘In Memoriam’ segment at the Oscars? Or will we have an honest reckoning with who Perry was?
Here was Perry to Diane Sawyer, in a soft-focus primetime interview last year, talking about performing on ‘Friends’ despite his crippling addictions throughout its entire 10-year run: ‘I would show up blindly hungover. Like shaking and crazy hungover’.
By Perry’s own timeline, in 1998 he was taking 55 Vicodin a day — on top of drinking and smoking and whatever else he was doing.
Imagine what a disruption he must have been on set. Imagine the chaos he caused, the late shoots, the sheer disrespect to the cast and crew.
It would not have been hard to write Perry out of ‘Friends’ for a while. It would not have been hard to tell him to take a year and go to rehab and get himself together — especially in a pre-TMZ era, one in which scandal was more easily contained.
But ‘Friends’, as an ensemble, was making too many people too much money.
At the show’s reunion, which aired in 2021, Perry cut a sad figure – distinctly separate to the other five cast members. That all makes sense now.
In the introduction to Perry’s memoir, his co-star Lisa Kudrow wrote that the question she’s been asked most was, ‘How’s Matthew Perry doing?’
It was a question, she wrote, that she never quite knew how to answer.
Perry’s book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year, surging again after his death.
How should we regard his book now?
A book that he dedicated to all his ‘fellow sufferers’. A book he promoted while claiming to be 18 months sober, which would have included his appearance on the ‘Friends’ reunion — even though sources have since told the Mail that Perry was ‘never clean’. That he actually had a harem of young women coming to his house and delivering him drugs, often Oxycontin.
How will active addicts and those in recovery see Perry’s lies as anything other than a betrayal?
Perry is not the first to falsify an addiction memoir. In 2003, author James Frey published ‘A Million Little Pieces’, which hit No.1 on the New York Times bestseller list for 15 consecutive weeks and became an Oprah’s Book Club pick.
And then The Smoking Gun website revealed that a good portion of the book was fabricated. Frey was forced to go back on Oprah and basically commit seppuku. Refunds were offered to readers and future editions were published with a disclaimer.
Perry’s book should now, at the very least, be re-issued with a similar reader warning.
At the ‘Friends’ reunion (pictured), which aired in 2021, Perry cut a sad figure – distinctly separate to the other five cast members. That all makes sense now.
As for that legacy he so desperately wished for — well, it’s all but destroyed.
Sources told US Weekly on Wednesday that Perry ‘had to pay for a lot of women to go to therapy’ due to the distress of being in his orbit.
One nurse who worked with him was so traumatized that she quit the profession altogether, the magazine reports. His outbursts of rage were constant: throwing objects, flipping tables, punching walls.
One source claims he then tried to minimize the violence, saying: ‘If I wanted to hurt you, I would have.’
They also say an ex-girlfriend in her early 20s threatened to sue Perry in 2020 for emotional and psychological abuse, and that he got her hooked on opioids. Perry is said to have settled with her and made her sign an NDA.
There are likely other women out there who have similar stories to tell.
Matthew Perry was not a ‘Friend’ to the end but instead, sadly, a fraud.
The lies he told were bigger than the ones he told to himself, and he’s left real wreckage behind — among those who loved him, those he is said to have harmed physically and emotionally, and those addicts who saw, in him, their own potential.
There is no Hollywood ending here.