Michael Oher, the former NFL player whose poverty-to-professional-football life story inspired 2009’s Oscar-winning film The Blind Side, alleges in a new petition to terminate a conservatorship that the adoption at the movie’s center was a sham engineered by Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy for profit.
The 14-page document, first reported on by ESPN, was filed Monday in Tennessee by 37-year-old Oher, who only began digging into the film deal after he stopped playing football in 2016. Oher’s petition asks the court to end the Tuohys’ conservatorship, issue an injunction prohibiting them from using his name and likeness, and have the couple pay him his fair share of profits, as well as unspecified damages.
“The lie of Michael’s adoption” actually amounted to a conservatorship signed less than three months after he turned 18 in 2004, granting the Tuohys legal control over Oher’s financial dealings, according to the legal filing. “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,” the document states. The Tuohy family’s attorney, Steve Farese, declined to comment to ESPN, only stating that a legal response would be filed in the weeks to come. Vanity Fair has reached out to Farese for comment as well.
Oher further claims that he’s never received a cent from The Blind Side, the biopic that was based off Michael Lewis’s 2006 book and made more than $300 million at the box office. The John Lee Hancock–helmed movie won Sandra Bullock an Academy Award for her performance as Leigh Anne and also starred Tim McGraw as Sean and Quinton Aaron as Oher. According to the petition, the Tuohys and their two birth children were each paid $225,000, plus 2.5% of the film’s “defined net proceeds.” Furthermore, the suit alleges, a 2007 contract seemingly signed by Oher relinquished his life rights to 20th Century Fox “without any payment whatsoever.” In their 2010 book, In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving, the Tuohys wrote that compensation for The Blind Side was divided five ways amongst their family members.
Oher has also previously alleged that his onscreen depiction as an academically challenged teenager wreaked havoc on his professional life. “People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie,” Oher said in 2015, per ESPN. “They don’t really see the skills and the kind of player I am.”
According to Oher’s attorney, J. Gerard Stranch IV, “Mike’s relationship with the Tuohy family started to decline when he discovered that he was portrayed in the movie as unintelligent.” That relationship continued to weaken “as he learned that he was the only member of the family not receiving royalty checks from the movie, and it was permanently fractured when he realized he wasn’t adopted and a part of the family.”
Members of the Tuohy family began responding to the suit on Monday. Sean Tuohy told the Daily Memphian that Oher’s claims have “devastated” the family, explaining that he and Leigh Anne formulated the conservatorship so that Oher would be eligible to play football at their alma mater, the University of Mississippi. Sean said that “everybody in the family got an equal share” of $14,000 from the film, “including Michael.” He added, “I will say it’s upsetting that people would think I would want to make money off any of my children.”
Sean and Leigh Anne’s son, Sean Tuohy Jr., gave an interview to Barstool Radio in which he claimed to have made “60, 70 grand over the course of the last four, five years” from the movie. He also challenged the idea that Oher only learned of the conservatorship earlier this year. “If he says he learned that in February, I find that hard to believe,” Sean Jr. said. “I was curious…to go back to look at our family group texts to see what things had been said, and there were things back in 2020, 2021 that were like, ‘If you guys give me this much, then I won’t go public with things.’”
Oher has shared his misgivings about the film most candidly in his new book, When Your Back’s Against the Wall, released last week. “There has been so much created from The Blind Side that I am grateful for, which is why you might find it as a shock that the experience surrounding the story has also been a large source of some of my deepest hurt and pain over the past fourteen years,” Oher writes. “Beyond the details of the deal, the politics, and the money behind the book and movie, it was the principle of the choices some people made that cut me the deepest.”