Sarah Silverman reveals shocking secret behind baby brother's death

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Sarah Silverman has revealed a shocking family secret involving her baby brother’s death.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Silverman, 54, dropped “a big bomb” making a surprise revelation about her brother Jeffrey’s death, which happened before she was born.

Her sibling died when he was three-months-old and for years she had believed that Jeffrey died in a mishap that happened with his crib while her grandparents were babysitting him when her late parents, Donald and Beth Ann O’Hara, were on vacation.

“The story was that something happened with the crib, and Jeffrey’s little body slid and he got suffocated,” Silverman told the magazine. “But if you look back, there was never a lawsuit with the crib company or anything.”

Silverman said her dad told her the truth about Jeffrey’s death when he visited her backstage in 2022 during a Broadway production of her 2010 memoir The Bedwetter.

The show included a joke about Jeffrey’s death and afterwards Donald shared his suspicions that his father may have killed the boy.

“My dad says, ‘I always felt that he was crying or something, and my dad shook him,’” Silverman told Rolling Stone. “‘He shook him in a rage and killed him.’”

Silverman said that when he made the surprising admission it made sense to her.

“As soon as he said it, it was like, ‘Of course, that’s what happened,’” Silverman said. “His mother always stood by her husband. She watched him beat the s— out of her son.”

The comedienne couldn’t ask her mother what she thought because “she was dead.”

Silverman said that her father “had a heartbreaking childhood” and her granddad “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.

But she told the outlet that how her dad made the revelation tracked with other big news he shared with her over the years.

“That was my dad,”  Silverman said. “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.”

Silverman’s parents split when she was six years old and both remarried. Her mother Beth died in 2015 and her father passed away in May 2023, shortly after the death of his second wife, Janice.

After his death, the School of Rock actress paid tribute to Donald in a heartfelt Instagram post.

“My best pal, Schleppy – my dad, died last night,” she wrote in the caption of the post. “All the sisters, and grandkids surrounded him with love and singing and very dark f—ed up jokes this final week.”

Silverman added, “He always said he was the richest man in the world because of his family, and he was.” 

Silverman’s new Netflix special, Sarah Silverman: PostMortem, finds her humorously dealing with the deaths of her father and stepmom.

mdaniell@postmedia.com