Sarah Silverman has opened up about her upbringing and has shared a chilling story of how her grandfather allegedly murdered her brother.
In a candid interview with Rolling Stone, the 54-year-old comedian and Saturday Night Live alum revealed that the story she'd always believed about her infant brother Jeffrey's tragic passing turned out to be a complete fabrication.
Silverman, who wasn't yet born when the incident occurred, said she grew up thinking her three-month-old brother had died in a heartbreaking crib accident.
“He suffocated,” she believed, after falling through a gap between the mattress and the crib’s bottom rail. The tragedy occurred five years before her birth, while her mother Beth was away on a cruise she had won on a game show, leaving baby Jeffrey with her in-laws.
“But if you look back, there was never a lawsuit with the crib company or anything,” she said, hinting at cracks in the story that only made sense in hindsight.
The dark truth didn’t come out until decades later, just before her father Donald's death in 2023. Silverman says her dad made a gut-wrenching confession: he believed his own father, whom he described as violent, had killed Jeffrey.
“My dad says, ‘I always felt that he was crying or something, and my dad shook him',” she recalled. “As soon as he said it, it was like, 'Of course, that’s what happened’.”
The admission was made in what Sarah described as a strikingly odd setting. She was performing in Bedwetter, her off-Broadway production in Manhattan, which includes a scene where a young version of Sarah cracks a joke about Jeffrey’s death.
Her dad came to see the show every night for five nights in a row—then broke the silence backstage.
Explaining the timing of the revelation, Silverman told the magazine she sees comedy as a coping mechanism: “the relief valve.” Still, she admitted that jokes can sometimes land in “the worst and most inappropriate place.”
Silverman added that the shocking confession made sense given what she knew of her father’s traumatic upbringing.
“My dad had a heartbreaking childhood,” she said. “His dad beat the s**t 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.”
“His mother always stood by her husband. She watched him beat the s**t out of her son. I couldn’t ask my mom, because she was dead.”
Sarah’s mother, Beth, passed away in 2015, leaving her unable to fill in any missing pieces of the story.
Despite the revelations, Sarah spoke warmly of her dad, calling him her “best friend” and “buddy” who was “always dropping bombs” like this.
She also shared that her parents eventually went through an “ugly divorce,” with Donald remarrying not long after it was finalized.
The revelations come ahead of the release of her new special PostMortem, a show that reflects on the deaths of her parents and the weight of unresolved family trauma.