Sarah Silverman has shared an extraordinary and shocking revelation her father made to her before he died, about the circumstances surrounding the death of her brother, Jeffrey, when he was three months old.
The US comedian, 54, is preparing to release a new special, PostMortem, about the deaths of her parents Beth Ann Halpin (1941 – 2015) and Donald Silverman (1937 – 2023).
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Silverman spoke about her late parents and the themes behind the show, before the journalist told her that he’d been unable to talk about his own father after he was killed in a plane crash.
He wondered if Silverman’s parents had ever been able to talk about Jeffrey’s death, prompting her to explain she was going to tell him “a big bomb”.
While she was writing her 2010 memoir, The Bedwetter – which was later turned into a 2022 musical – she said she was struck by the fact that, while her parents had different accounts of “every issue of their marriage”, they had the same one when describing how Jeffrey died.
In her memoir, Silverman said her brother had been left in the care of her grandparents, Max and Rose, while Donald and Beth Ann went on holiday. Max told his son that he had been checking on Jeffrey in the night, as he had been crying a lot and Rose was hard of hearing.
When her grandfather got up to check on Jeffrey in the morning, he apparently found the baby had suffocated after slipping through a narrow space between the mattress and the bottom rail of the crib.
“The story was that something happened with the crib, and Jeffrey’s little body slid and he got suffocated,” Silverman told Rolling Stone. “But if you look back, there was never a lawsuit with the crib company or anything.”
In 2022, the year before he died, her father came to see a Manhattan production of The Bedwetter five nights in a row. The show included a scene about Silverman as a child making a joke about Jeffrey’s death to her grandmother and no one laughing.
Donald Silverman came backstage after the fifth show and told his daughter a different story about her brother, who died before she was born, claiming that it was in fact his own violent father who had been responsible.
“My dad says, ‘I always felt that he was crying or something, and my dad shook him,’” she recalled. “‘He shook him in a rage and killed him.’”
Her manager apparently gasped at this revelation, and the room went quiet for a moment.
“As soon as he said it, it was like, ‘Of course, that’s what happened,’” Silverman continued. “[Donald’s] 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.”
Silverman had earlier spoken of her father’s “heartbreaking” childhood, when he was subject to daily beatings by his own father: “He had a younger brother who wasn’t touched. His father made the kids call him Mr Silverman.”
She suggested this kind of bombshell-dropping was par for the course from her dad: “We were playing poker once, and he just dropped in that one of the priests at his school fondled him. I was like ‘Dad!’ He was always dropping bombs.”
The Independent has contacted Silverman’s representatives for additional comment.
Donald Silverman died shortly after his second wife of more than 40 years, Janice, passed away.
“My best pal, Schleppy – my dad, died last night,” the stand-up comedian, 52, wrote in an Instagram post after his death in 2023.
“All the sisters, and grandkids surrounded him with love and singing and very dark f***ed up jokes this final week. But ultimately, he wanted to be with his love, Janice, who we lost last Monday.”
“He always said he was the richest man in the world because of his family, and he was,” Silverman added.
In another recent interview with The Guardian, Silverman said touring PostMortem across the US had been “a nice way of keeping [her parents] alive”, but it would be “time to put it to bed” after PostMortem’s UK run, which concluded last month.
Her previous comedy specials have included Netflix’s A Speck of Dust (2017) and HBO’s Someone You Love (2023).
PostMortem will be available to stream on Netflix from Tuesday 20 May.
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