Sarah Silverman always knew that she had a brother who died five years before she was born, but didn’t have the real details about his death — until now.
“I’m going to tell you a big bomb,” Sarah, 54, shared during a Rolling Stone feature, published on Sunday, May 18, before detailing the truth about her brother Jeffrey who passed in his infancy.
“The story was that something happened with the crib, and Jeffrey’s little body slid and he got suffocated,” she told the publication. “But if you look back, there was never a lawsuit with the crib company or anything.”
Sarah grew up hearing that the incident occurred while Jeffrey was in the care of her paternal grandparents.
When she was writing her 2010 memoir The Bedwetter, Silverman spoke to both of her parents, who unknowingly hinted at something being awry with Jeffrey’s death. Although her parents, Donald Silverman and Beth Ann O’Hara, typically had differing versions of every story they told, when it came to talking about Jeffrey, their stories matched up perfectly.
Donald went to see his daughter’s Bedwetter: The Musical when it was Off-Broadway in 2022, in which she made a joke about Jeffrey. After watching five performances of the show in a row, Donald was finally ready to tell the truth. (Donald died in May 2023.)
“My dad says, ‘I always felt that he was crying or something, and my dad shook him,’” she recalled, referring to her grandfather. “‘He shook him in a rage and killed him.’”
Sarah continued: “As soon as he said it, it was like, ‘Of course, that’s what happened.’ His mother always stood by her husband. She watched him beat the s*** out of her son. I couldn’t ask my mom, because she was dead.”
A separate story shared about her family in the same Rolling Stone profile also seemed to hint at her father’s tale of Jeffrey’s death.
When she was 5 years old, Sarah was in the car with her grandmother and was told to buckle her seatbelt. “Yeah, we don’t want to wind up like Jeffrey,” the young Sarah retorted, recalling that her grandma burst into tears.
Much of the interview was focused on Sarah’s late father, whom she referred to as “my best friend, my buddy” before his death.
“Well, he wasn’t my best friend until I was older,” she admitted. “He was not physically abusive, but he had uncontrollable rage.”
At one point, Sarah detailed her father’s upbringing — which seemed to explain more about her grandfather.
“My dad had a heartbreaking childhood,” she said. “His dad beat the s*** out of him every day, just mercilessly. He had a younger brother who wasn’t touched. His father made the kids call him Mr. Silverman.”
