The Blind Side's Michael Oher says family never adopted him, tricked him signing away his rights

The 2009 Oscar-nominated film The Blind Side, an ostensible true story, is about a Black teenager named Michael Oher who was bounced around the foster system for years, having never been in one place long enough to really get a proper education (or, outrageously, his own bed), until he is adopted by a white family—led by Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy—and taught to use his size and “protective instincts” to play football. It was a huge feel-good hit, and also (perhaps relatedly) one of the most explicit modern examples of the white savior trope (wherein saintly white people come along to magically improve the lives of downtrodden minorities who can’t take care of themselves, see also: Green Book).

So the movie has always been a bit gross and exploitative, but according to some new allegations made by the real Michael Oher, the true story is much, much worse. As reported by ESPN, Oher filed a petition in a Tennessee court claiming that the basic premise of the story—white family adopts Black teenager—is a lie and that the Tuohy family never actually adopted him. Apparently, just after he turned 18, the Tuohy family actually “tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators,” rather than really adopting him, which game them legal control over his name and his story.

Oher says the Tuohy’s signed a deal to make the Blind Side movie that gave them—Leigh Anne, husband Sean, and their two birth children—$225,000 and 2.5 percent of the film’s “defined net proceeds,” while Oher signed a contract that he has no memory of that gave 20th Century Fox the rights to his story “without any payment whatsoever.” ESPN adds that he says that, even if he did really sign it, “no one explained its implications to him.”

On top of that, ESPN says the deal for the movie lists all four members of the Tuohy family as having the same representative at Hollywood talent agency CAA, but Oher was represented by Debra Branan, “a close family friend of the Tuohys and the same lawyer who filed the 2004 conservatorship petition.” Oher has also previously noted that the way he’s depicted in the film (as an unintelligent young man who had to be taught how football works) negatively impacted his career and his life—and the Tuohys apparently signed off on it.

Oher’s petition says he uncovered all of this recently after hiring a lawyer to try and figure out the details behind the deal the family made for The Blind Side, explaining that the movie took off right when he was starting his NFL career and that—while something about the deal didn’t sit right with him and he suspected that “others were profiting” from it and he wasn’t—he never had the time to really look into it until after he had retired in 2016. Earlier this year, the lawyer found the conservatorship documents and Oher realized that, apparently, the Tuohys had never really adopted him but were still, allegedly, getting rich off of his life story (not to mention telling Oher, and the general public, that they had adopted him).

Oher wants the court to end the conservatorship and to stop the Tuohys from using his name and likeness, in addition to getting him “a full accounting of the money” they’ve earned using his name and to pay him “his fair share of profits” plus “unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.”