Sarah Silverman drops her new Netflix special, PostMortem, today, Tuesday, May 20, but before that, she dropped a massive bombshell about a family tragedy.
The comedian spoke with Rolling Stone about the new special, which covers the deaths of her parents, Beth Ann Halpin, who died in 2015, and Donald Silverman, who passed in 2023. During the interview, she told journalist Stephen Rodrick that she was going to tell him a “big bomb.”
Silverman explained how when she was writing her 2010 memoir, The Bedwetter, she was struck by how her parents had very different versions of every issue of their marriage but had the exact same retelling of how their infant son, Jeffrey, died when he was three months old.
“The story was that something happened with the crib, and Jeffrey’s little body slid, and he got suffocated,” she said, recalling how her grandparents were looking after her brother while her parents were on a trip. “But if you look back, there was never a lawsuit with the crib company or anything.”
She went on to say how her father came to see a production of Bedwetter in 2022, five nights in a row. In the stage musical, there is a scene that features Silverman making a joke about her brother’s death in front of her grandmother and nobody laughing.
After the fifth show, Donald came backstage and opened up to Silverman about how Jeffrey really died. “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.’”
The reporter noted that Silverman’s manager gasped during this portion of the interview and the room fell quiet for a moment.
“As soon as he said it, it was like, ‘Of course, that’s what happened,’” Silverman continued. “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 revealed that her father had a “heartbreaking” childhood where he was routinely beaten by his own father. “He had a younger brother who wasn’t touched,” she shared. “His father made the kids call him Mr Silverman.”
She also said it wasn’t uncommon for her dad to drop bombshells like that out of the blue. “That was my dad,” she laughed. “We were playing poker once, and he just dropped in that one of the priests at his school fondled him. I was like ‘Dad!’”
Donald died in 2023 just shortly after the passing of his second wife, Janice. At the time, Silverman wrote on Instagram, “My best pal, Schleppy – my dad, died last night. All the sisters, and grandkids surrounded him with love and singing and very dark f***** up jokes this final week. But ultimately, he wanted to be with his love, Janice, who we lost last Monday.”
She added, “He always said he was the richest man in the world because of his family, and he was.”
Sarah Silverman: PostMortem, Streaming, Netflix