Sarah Silverman is going public for the first time with the shocking story her father told her about her only brother’s death.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the comedian and actor, 54, said she and her siblings grew up believing Jeffrey died as an infant because of a crib accident.
All that changed when Silverman’s dad, Donald Silverman, told her in 2022 that he believed Jeffrey died after his paternal grandfather, Max, shook him in a violent rage.
“The story was that something happened with the crib, and Jeffrey’s little body slid and he got suffocated. But if you look back, there was never a lawsuit with the crib company or anything,” Sarah Silverman told the publication.
The former “Sarah Silverman Program” star said her father told her the truth three years ago after he heard her recount Jeffrey’s death in her autobiographical off-Broadway musical “The Bedwetter,” which was based on her bestselling 2010 memoir of the same name.
The elder Silverman came backstage and told his daughter that Jeffrey’s grandparents were babysitting him while he and Silverman’s mom, Beth, were on vacation.
“My dad says, ‘I always felt that he was crying or something, and my dad shook him,’” Silverman recalled. “‘He shook him in a rage and killed him.’”
“As soon as he said it, it was like, ‘Of course, that’s what happened,’” Silverman recalled. “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.”
Silverman described her father’s childhood as “heartbreaking” because of her grandfather’s abuse.
“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,” she said.
During a 2022 visit to TODAY, Silverman said her “Bedwetter” musical revisited the challenges of her own childhood — which included struggles with anxiety and bedwetting — and their impact on her parents and her three sisters.
“I’m the youngest so I was kind of the joy. I made my family laugh,” she said, adding that her musical “takes place in the ’80s” when she was 10.
“The Bedwetter,” she added, is about “a kid who is happy-go-lucky but falls apart, and the family kind of falls apart.”
Silverman’s new Netflix special, “Sarah Silverman: PostMortem,” premiering May 20, explores how she’s processed the death of her father, her mother and her step-mother, Janice, according to Variety.
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