Affidavit: Doctor prescribed Prince opioids under friend’s name

MINNEAPOLIS — Court documents unsealed Monday in the investigation into Prince’s death suggest a doctor and a close friend helped him improperly obtain prescription opioid painkillers, but they shed no new light on how the superstar got the fentanyl that killed him.

The affidavits and search warrants were unsealed in Carver County District Court as the yearlong investigation into Prince’s death continues. The documents show authorities searched Paisley Park, cellphone records of Prince’s associates and Prince’s email accounts to try to determine how he got the fentanyl, a synthetic opioid drug 50 times more powerful than heroin.

The documents don’t reveal answers to that question, but do provide the most details yet seen on Prince’s struggle with addiction to prescription opioids in the days before he died.

Prince was 57 when he was found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park estate on April 21. Just six days earlier, he fell ill on a plane and had to be revived with two doses of a drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose.

Associates at Paisley Park also told investigators that Prince was recently “going through withdrawals, which are believed to be the result of the abuse of prescription medication.”

The documents unsealed Monday allege Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg, a family physician who saw the musician twice last April, told authorities he prescribed the opioid painkiller oxycodone to Prince but put it under the name of Prince’s bodyguard and close friend, Kirk Johnson, “for Prince’s privacy,” one affidavit said.

Schulenberg’s attorney, Amy Conners, disputed that. She said in a statement that Schulenberg “never directly prescribed opioids to Prince, nor did he ever prescribe opioids to any other person with the intent that they would be given to Prince.”

It is illegal for a doctor to write a prescription for someone under another person’s name.