Sarah Silverman Believes Her Late Brother Was Murdered — And She Thinks She Knows Who Did It

Where a person stumbled upon Sarah Silverman says a lot about them. People whose memories stretch back to a time before the internet may recall her single-season stint on Saturday Night Live, from 1993–94. Their loss was our gain because she was much better suited for Mr. Show, the sketch comedy series that allowed Bob Odenkirk and David Cross to bring weird to the masses. Standup was her first love, and she was giving that her all while breaking into Hollywood via bit parts on shows and films.

What really catapulted Sarah into the comedy ether was The Sarah Silverman Show, which ran for three seasons on Comedy Central. This is also when an infamous episode featuring Sarah in blackface would come back to haunt the comic later. It's impossible to put Sarah in a single box, which is part of her charm. The seasoned comic also knows how to balance the sad and funny, which she does with ease in 2025's PostMortem. It's in this special that we learn about her brother's mysterious death.

In a conversation with Rolling Stone, Sarah described her father's childhood as heartbreaking. Donald "Schleppy" Silverman passed away in May 2023, a week after his second wife Janice died. In an emotional tribute to her dad on Instagram, Sarah said he "wanted to be with his love." This was a far cry from the life Donald had growing up, which involved daily physical abuse perpetrated by his own father, who never laid a hand on his other son.

Years later, Donald would bond with Sarah's mother, Beth Ann, over their abusive childhoods. They eventually married and had four daughters and a son. Unfortunately, this was a deeply unhappy union due to the fact that Donald would constantly belittle Beth Ann, slowly breaking her down, which did not help her undiagnosed depression. Things only got worse after their only son Jeffrey died.

In 1965, five years before Sarah was born, her parents went on a cruise and left Jeffrey with Donald's folks. The infant died after part of his crib collapsed on him. Years later, in 2022, Sarah would reference her brother's bizarre passing in her stage show Bedwetter, which Donald saw five nights in a row. That's when Sarah's father revealed that he believed his own dad killed Jeffrey. "I always felt that he was crying or something, and my dad shook him," he said.

Something clicked in Sarah when her dad shared his theory. "Of course, that’s what happened," she recalled thinking. "His mother always stood by her husband. She watched him beat the s--t out of her son." That last realization helped Sarah understand why her grandmother once burst into tears when she mentioned Jeffrey. After reaching this conclusion, Sarah remembered that she couldn't ask her mom about it. She was already dead.

In her conversation with Rolling Stone, Sarah was quick to say that her dad became her best friend later in life. "He was not physically abusive," she said, "but he had uncontrollable rage." You can see how far their relationship came in her own Instagram postmortem about Donald. "He always said he was the richest man in the world because of his family, and he was," she wrote.