Back in 2009, retired NFL star Michael Oher’s life was spotlighted in the movie The Blind Side, with Quinton Aaron playing the football player and Sandra Bullock playing Leigh Anne Tuohy, his adoptive mother. Written and directed by John Lee Hancock, and based off the book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game by Michael Lewis, the sports drama was both a critical and commercial success, with CinemaBlend giving it 3.5 out of 5 stars in our review. However, now Oher is saying a large chunk of The Blind Side is fabricated, specifically that he was never adopted and that his alleged parents exploited him.
As reported by ESPN, a 14-page petition was filed in Shelby County, Tennessee alleging that rather than Leigh Anne Tuohy and her husband Sean adopting Oher, the couple supposedly “tricked” him into signing a document just a few months after he turned 18 that made them his conservators and gave them the legal right to “make business deals in his name.” Furthermore, it’s claimed in the petition that the Tuhoys and their two children have received millions of dollars in royalties from the success of The Blind Side (specifically $225,000 each, along with 2.5% of the movie’s "defined net proceeds”) thanks to the power wielded by this conservatorship, yet Oher received nothing for a story "that would not have existed without him." As it’s specifically stated in the petition:
The lie of Michael's adoption is one upon which Co-Conservators Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the expense of their Ward, the undersigned Michael Oher. Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys.
Michael Oher’s petition is asking the court to end the Tuhoys’ conservatorship and issue an injunction to prevent them from using his name and likeness, as well as pay him his “fair share of profits” from their business deals revolving around him on top of “unspecified” compensatory and punitive damages. The petition claims that since August 2004, the Tuhoys made both Oher and the general public think that they’d adopted him, and they “used that untruth to gain financial advantages for themselves and the foundations which they own or which they exercise control.”
Oher being in a conservatorship isn’t new information, as he wrote in his 2011 memoir I Beat the Odds that the Tuhoys allegedly told him that this arrangement “means pretty much the exact same thing as 'adoptive parents,' but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account.” But that’s not the case, as being adopted by them meant he would have been a legal member of their family and retained control of his financial affairs, whereas under a conservatorship, he lost that control.
It’s noted in ESPN’s writeup that despite the Tuhoys having profited off The Blind Side (though they’ve previously claimed they didn’t make much money off the movie, instead receiving a “flat fee” that was divided five ways), Oher reportedly signed a contract in 2007 that looked to “give away” the life rights to his story "without any payment whatsoever." The petition states that Oher doesn’t remember signing this contract, and if he did, no one explained what it meant for him. The former Baltimore Ravens player started looking into this deal after he retired in 2016, and this past February, his attorney, J. Gerard Stranch IV, uncovered the conservatorship.
We’ll keep you apprised on how this legal saga concerning the real life events on which The Blind Side is based on ends up progressing. If you’re interested in watching the movie, it can be streamed with the Live TV add-on to your Hulu subscription. Otherwise, you can read about how Michael Oher said The Blind Side hurt his football career, or look through our 2023 movie release schedule to see what cinematic entertainment comes out late this year.
