MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Now we know the awful truth – the legacy Matthew Perry so desperately clung to as a poster boy for recovered addicts was all a tragic, hopeless lie

The one where it was all a tragic lie.

We now know that Matthew Perry wasn't clean at the end. Despite claims to the contrary in his best-selling memoir, he was probably never clean.

His autopsy report, released last week, was another shock: He had enough ketamine in his system to sedate a surgical patient.

Perry sold fellow addicts a fantasy. It's entirely possible he had to believe it.

“I wanted to share when I was safe from getting into the dark side of everything,” he told People magazine last year. “I had to wait until I was reasonably safely sober – and away from the active disease of alcoholism and addiction – to write it all down. And most importantly, I was pretty sure it would help people.”

If anyone needed help, it was Perry himself.

As Alison Boshoff exclusively reported in the Mail, a source close to Perry revealed the truth: “He lied to everyone about his cleanliness. He never was. It's very sad. You know, the biggest lie he told was probably to himself.”

Still, we all believed him, and that's not just because of his acting ability. We popular to believe him. Perry's biggest selling point was his refusal to wrap up his story neatly, his soft-bellied vulnerability.

He wrote it and said it again and again: the severity of his addictions meant he would never be safe from himself.

“I have no other sobriety in me,” he wrote. “If I left, I could never come back… It's going to kill me.”

In his self-proclaimed quest to help other addicts, he was willing to make public the humiliations he suffered and the ravages of his body: his top teeth fell out all at once; the fourteen operations that left him crying; his near-death experience; the operations that are yet to come.

“I will never be ready,” he wrote. 'I will always have the insides of a man in his nineties… the scars… my stomach looks like a topographical map of China. And they fucking hurt.”

Perry talked about his colostomy bag, his sexual impotence, the $9 million he spent trying to get clean, the 6,000 AA meetings and the 55 Vicodin a day.

He confessed that as a teenager he was so desperately unhappy that he got down on his knees and begged God for glory.

And wow, did he get it: a global superstar that few will ever know. But as the saying goes, more tears are shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.

For all his distinctive gifts, Perry died the sad, lonely, ignominious death of any famous drug addict: Elvis on the toilet, Whitney in the bathtub, Prince in his elevator.

It turns out that Perry's post-memoir was a misery. He hid the truth, became mean and pushed away the people closest to him.

He sought comfort with women who were far too young: a 25-year-old ex-Miss USA, a 22-year-old porn star. He lost his fiancée Molly Hurwitz after she caught him messaging a 19-year-old on Raya.

In other words, he was uniquely gifted – and a total cliché.

He allowed himself to believe that his wealth and fame exempted him from the rules: hence, as he admitted, the chain-smoking in his hospital bed, the crashing into someone's living room without consequence, the chartering of a private plane to escape rehab. and get high.

He had the arrested development that is so common among addicts, especially his obsession with Batman.

He had the superhero's bat wings engraved into the bottom of his swimming pool. He had a black and red car that he called the Batmobile. Calling himself “Mattman,” less than two weeks before his death, he posted his pool's red-lit bat signal with the caption, “Sleep well everyone, I've got the city tonight.”

Troubling stuff for someone who qualifies for AARP membership.

But Perry never had to live in the real world, and that, like his addictions, affected him.

“Angry and mean,” is how a friend described Perry in the days before his death.

Another source told the New York Post that Perry struggled with AA meetings in New York City.

'Mr. Perry couldn't handle the tough love,” the source said. 'I sympathize with him, but in my 25 years of experience it is sometimes really possible to 'help' someone. I think he had a lot of people who meant well. He was in a golden cage'.

In recent days, his use of ketamine has been explained away as purely therapeutic and used under a doctor's care to treat his “depression and anxiety.”

But read the fine print of the autopsy report and you'll see that Perry's ketamine overdose was almost certainly caused by illegal recreational use.

“His last known treatment occurred a week and a half before his death,” the report concludes. 'The ketamine in his system at death could be not from that infusion therapy, as the half-life of ketamine is three to four hours or less.

An important point: Medical ketamine, when administered correctly, has been shown to be very successful in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and addiction. Perry's overdose shouldn't change that.

That's why the truth matters here.

Otherwise he was a walking chemist. In addition to the ketamine, Perry also took testosterone, possibly to counteract the effects of an estrogen-based weight-loss drug; buprenorphine, to treat opioid addiction; the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam; and clonazepam, a drug used to treat seizures and panic disorders, was metabolized.

“Multiple” prescription drug bottles were found in his home, investigators said, along with “plates filled with various loose pills,” vaping products and nicotine lollipops.

How grim. How desperately sad – for him, for his fans and for addicts everywhere – that the legacy he tried to leave, not as a “friend” but as someone whose triumph over addiction could help others, has been jeopardized.

He knew it could end like this.

“Secrets kill you,” he told Diane Sawyer last year. “Secrets kill people like me.”