by Iman Milner
November 9, 2023
Michael Oher, the subject of the 2009 film The Blind Side, allegedly received more than $138,000 from his adoptive parents.
Michael Oher, the subject of the 2009 film The Blind Side, allegedly received more than $138,000 from his adoptive parents, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, despite claims that he never profited from his story, ESPN reported. The claim is the latest in an ongoing dispute between Oher and the Tuohy family, who he alleges used his athletic prowess to sell a “white savior” narrative full of lies in order to make money.
“By agreement between the family members including Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, their children SJ and Collins as well as Michael Oher, the book and movie proceeds were to be split five ways,” said the family’s lawyer, according to ESPN.
The couple also believes that due to spending “tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to support Mr. Oher during his high school and college years,” they did not cheat him out of anything that was owed. The profit paid to Oher was reportedly split up over ten payments between Jan 2007 and April 2023. The sum amount also represents money made from the book of the same title, which predates the movie’s release.
The film grossed over $300 million at the box office, of which the Tuohys were paid $432,000 by Twentieth Century Fox, Alcon Film Fund, and Left Tackle Pictures, ESPN reported. Oher filed a petition in August to end a conservatorship he alleges the Tuohys tricked him into signing a mere three months after his 18th birthday. In his book, When Your Back’s Against The Wall, Oher describes how the film about his life ultimately hurt his football career as well as upended the fantasy of family dreamed up by the Tuohys.
“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 14 years,” he wrote, before going on to reveal that the Tuohys had never formally adopted him as the movie suggested. A lawyer from the family would later clarify that the family’s use of the word “adoption” was meant to be “in the colloquial sense,” according to ESPN.
