The Blind Side Lawsuit: What the Press Overlooked and Why It Matters
An exhaustive look at the evidence, plus thoughts on how premature judgment makes the job of justice much harder.
Michael Oher is a retired NFL player and two-time author. He was also a primary subject of Michael Lewis’s book The Blind Side and of its movie adaptation, which in large part chronicled Oher’s inspirational rise from poverty to sporting stardom.
This past Monday, Oher’s lawyers filed a petition claiming that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy—presented in the book and film as his surrogate family and mostly-altruistic champions—actually abused his good faith, tricking him into a conservatorship agreement at 18 that they then used to seize and hide his share of project royalties.
To simplify all the claims that have surfaced in the aftermath of this suit going viral, there are basically two ways that the Tuohy family could be the villains here:
Scenario 1. The suit’s central claim is true and the Tuohys knowingly bilked Oher out of millions of dollars of proceeds from projects based on his life.
Scenario 2. The above claim isn’t true and this isn’t really a story about money, but the family did mislead Oher by pretending to love and adopt him when really he was just their meal ticket to status and social enrichment. And in their faux interest they failed as his story stewards to ensure he was presented fairly.
Well, what does the available evidence say?
As for the first charge—i.e., the press's main focus—we now know it to be somewhere between mostly and entirely untrue. (Though we also knew enough on Monday for it to have been deeply irresponsible to broadcast his allegations uncritically.)
The second charge? Much murkier. That said, there’s a single piece of evidence—ie. whether Oher kept his full share in the Tuohy family’s significant wealth via their wills and trusts—that would go a very long way towards deciding the question either way. But to my knowledge no one who has covered this story has even noticed it, much less gotten into the implications of it. (The Tuohy family could mostly put this to bed by publicly verifying it, and they so far have not.1)
We’ll deal with both charges in full detail shortly. But first I want to talk about the much larger context here. While the case-curious can leap ahead, I encourage them to come back to the next section when they’re done. It’s important.
We reward corrections. See something wrong, misleading, or unfair? Use our anonymous Typeform or drop a comment in this post’s dispute doc.
The Overstatement Tax
This case is more sensitive for being at heart a question of race. The Tuohys are white, Oher is Black. That’s going to color people’s takeaways, especially when they take the story as it was presented by the majority of the press.2
This is where we have to be mindful of what I call The Overstatement Tax. If you claim someone did a horrible crime when in reality what they did was a less overt and more murky form of bad, the issue is less that you wrong the villain and more that you wrong other victims. Because your overstatement is going to be weaponized by your ideological opponents to win support against your cause. Every, every, every time. It’s a fundamental sociopolitical law, and it will never go away.
Let’s imagine that only the second charge here is true. In this scenario the Tuohys are not outright criminals, but did broadly mislead Oher for their own social ends. That would still be bad! It wouldn’t suddenly be fine because the first charge wasn’t true. But oh boy would that first charge being false make it so much harder to hold the Tuohys—and those like them—responsible for the things that were true.
To ground this in a historical example, consider the case of Michael Brown, the Black teenager famously murdered in 2014 as he held up his hands pleading for the trigger-happy officer to not shoot. Except, oops, that’s not quite what happened. This might be a shock, as the later developments didn’t get as much airtime, but the many subsequent investigations all found that the popular narratives were wrong and the officer’s account was indeed consistent with all available evidence. (Not that what happened was ok mind you. There was still a lot to be angry about.)
True Allyship
I’m a white dude. I’m deeply aware of the evils inflicted by people who share my gender and race. I want real justice for the oppressed—not just for past wrongs, but for the legacy of inequality left in their wake. But I’m also aware that a great many white folks don’t see it this way. They live in a distorted reality where racism was only a historical fact, maybe not actually that bad, and certainly nothing to do with them. The best work I can do as an ally is to ensure that this type of person is brought to confront their beliefs, and not hardened in them. This requires, in part, a thoughtful caution against overstatement. If Michael Brown wasn’t in fact murdered in cold blood by a racist cop, this has no real bearing on all the young Black people who have been (or on the wild state of racial policing in Ferguson). It’s a single case of many, and many are beyond dispute. But when we focus on Michael Brown as the face of a cause and it turns out that, oops, we got the story wrong, we make it all that much harder to win over those standing in the way of needful justice.
Quoting from this excellent writeup (from a Black columnist) on the Brown case:
Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. … [I[t is imperative that we continue marching for and giving voice to those killed in racially charged incidents at the hands of police and others. But we must never allow ourselves to march under the banner of a false narrative…. And when we discover that we have, we must acknowledge it, admit our error and keep on marching. That’s what I’ve done here.
Exactly! Because the alternative can be understood in these two tweets.
Anyway, it’s impossible to say with the evidence we have today if the second charge against the Tuohys is fully true. But our collective rush to judgment on the first charge is going to incur a massive overstatement tax that will poison the well and make the work of justice that much harder. That’s weighty.
It’s good to want to be on the right side of history, and to be a good ally. But this isn’t how we do that, and journalists should know better. Journalistic standards exist to ensure that reporters do at least a very basic amount of thinking and investigation before jumping on the dogpile. Those standards largely didn’t work here, as they often don’t. If we really do care about justice, that should give us pause.
Anyway, back to the main story.
Charge #1: Actual Crime
For the primary charge to be true, we’d have to believe the following:
That the Tuohys, despite already being somewhere between comfortably and generationally wealthy3, decided on a high-risk, low-reward scheme that would atom bomb their reputation if ever discovered—which would be fairly trivial given the third-party accounting involved.
That they began enacting their scheme in Oher’s first year at their high school—before he’d ever taken a snap for their football team and or even earned his sports eligibility—by silently paying for his lunches to begin earning his trust. (To sell this ploy, they also did the same thing for multiple other disadvantaged Black kids prior, including apparently paying some entire tuitions.)
That by the summer of 2004 they cemented their scheme by tricking Oher into a conservatorship agreement that they sold to him as an adoption, and that adding him to their insurance, personal wills, and family trusts was either just part of the ruse or purely meant to satisfy the NCAA (more on that later).
That they did all this with stunning foresight, given that Oher was at that point not on an academic pathway to D1 college admittance and Michael Lewis’s book was still a magazine article and two years away from publication, with any idea of big royalties from a smash movie to follow being a vague dream.
That despite securing this conservatorship, they declined to use it to try for a piece of his NFL income or other licensing deals, to dictate his choice of agent, or to manipulate any other financial decision. Or to ever invoke it at all.
That they poured at least tens of thousands of dollars into private tutors4, a pickup truck, and other expenses just to keep Oher’s trust as they waited for a longshot payday that at best would represent a fractional part of their wealth.
This, uh, does not strike me as plausible? It’s such an extraordinary claim that we should at least want…some evidence? We were offered approximately none. The lawsuit (more exactly a petition to end the conservatorship and return any money wrongly withheld during it, with damages) was high on theatrics and light on smoking guns.5 The best we were offered was a reference to a contract whose terms seem to very obviously not support a family windfall in the supposed millions of dollars.6
Infinitely more plausible to me: someone in Oher’s life convinced him that a big box office result means that big royalties are a given, and thus that a conspiracy must have existed all this time to deprive him of his rightful share.7
The family’s position8 is that more modest income—in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to date9—has indeed come in, that Oher has long been aware of this, that he has consistently been offered his 20% share, that at some point he began declining to cash his checks, that said amounts have been nonetheless deposited into a trust in his firstborn son’s name, and that they’ve paid the taxes on Oher’s portions.10
The nice thing here is that is all very simple for a court to verify. If rightful money has indeed been hidden from Oher, it won’t take a forensics mastermind to find, quantify, or return it. The whole thing would have been a supremely dumb crime.
More likely though, this secret money doesn’t exist. More likely, Oher is just the latest to learn that stories are cheap in Hollywood and that rights deals for an unknown don’t amount to much.11 Hollywood subsidizes their losses with their wins using creative accounting, and survivorship bias will always make the winners feel a bit cheated. So it goes. Welcome to show business. (For a longer explanation of why this system is the way it is and why the payouts are actually kinda fair, see this footnote.12)
Anyway, let’s turn to the charge that’s at least facially plausible: that even if this wasn’t really about money, the Tuohys did help Oher for less than selfless motives, misled him along the way, and overall failed in their duties as his stewards.
Charge #2: Mixed Motives
So, uh, warning: this is going to get into a nutty level of detail. I combed through both of Oher’s books, plus the Touhy’s, plus I (mostly) re-read and (fully) re-watched The Blind Side. I also went through as many archive interviews as I could fit in next to my day work. Most journalists here very obviously didn’t do this, which is reflected in their output.
I’ll break this into sections, with a TLDR for each section in italics on top.
The Adoption That Wasn’t
(It wasn’t a legal adoption, and the Tuohys still have yet to give a compelling/full explanation for why they declined to adopt. The movie never mentions adoption. Michael Lewis’s book doesn’t explicitly call it one either, but does kinda imply it.13 The Tuohys do say adopted in their book. The most telling thing here would be to know if the Tuohys kept Oher in their wills and family trust funds, or if/when/why he was removed. But also it doesn’t seem that the conservatorship affected the rights deals or associated payments.)
Quoting from Oher’s petition:
…the Tuohys presented [Michael Oher] with what he understood to be legal papers that were a necessary step in the adoption process. Michael trusted the Tuohys and signed where they told him to sign. What he signed, however, and unknown to Michael until after February of 2023, were not adoption papers, or the equivalent of adoption papers. Instead, it was the Petition for Appointment of Conservators which was filed in this cause on August 9, 2004 by Debra Branan, attorney of record in this matter. Ms. Branan was so close to the Tuohy family that Michael was encouraged to refer to her as Aunt Debbie. This Petition … included a request that the Conservators have total control over Michael Oher’s ability to negotiate for or enter any contract, despite the fact he was over 18 years of age and had no diagnosed physical or psychological disabilities.
Ok, so Oher claims he discovered all this “after February” of this year. (Also, put a pin in the diagnosis bit. We’ll get back to that.)
Now let’s quote from Oher’s first book (p. 169), released in 2011:
Since I was already over the age of eighteen and considered an adult by the state of Tennessee, Sean and Leigh Anne would be named as my “legal conservators.” They explained to me that it 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. Honestly, I didn’t care what it was called. I was just happy that no one could argue that we weren’t legally what we already knew was real: We were a family.
So by no later than 2011 Oher knew that it wasn’t an adoption per se. Taking him at his word, he may have understood it to be a legal equivalent. But this then implies that it took him some 12 years to either Google the term, ask someone about it, or review the paperwork involved. That’s weird, especially given what the Tuohys describe as past litigation attempts going back a few years? But I guess possible?
Setting that bit aside though, why did the Tuohys go this route? We’re offered two explanations, neither of which really answers the full question:
The main motivation for making him a legal part of the family (per the Tuohys’s recent comments and Lewis’s book) was to appease the NCAA. They’d been pushing Oher to attend their alma mater, Ole Miss.14 Because they were considered school boosters, the financial support they’d given Oher would have disqualified him from attending there. But if he was family it was permissible.
The Tuohys claim they were advised by Debra Branan that conservatorship was a better choice. But the explanation given—ie. that they couldn’t adopt Oher once he’d turned 18—seems not true by itself per Tennessee law (now or then).
Now, there is one possible explanation for the second bit, and if true I could kinda see why it was hidden from Oher. As part of getting his GPA high enough to get into a D1 school, the Tuohys used a complicated loophole that required certifying Oher as “learning disabled” to qualify him for some course replacements. While we’ll get into the whole subject of Oher’s intelligence in the next section, this was definitely about gaming the system and doesn’t seem to reflect how anyone felt about Oher. But I suppose the diagnosis could have either: (1) complicated a legal adoption, (2) opened the door for a faster path? As time was of the essence (they needed to satisfy the NCAA before national signing day), they may very well have taken a second shortcut.
(Some have also speculated that the Tuohys wanted to be sure to not disinherit Oher’s mother. This would fit with all the anecdotes of the care they showed towards her.15 But no idea if it was actually a consideration. They could have had other—possibly darker—motivations. It’s on them to explain more, then for the world to judge.)
Whatever the full reason though, what’s crucial is that this conservatorship agreement seems to have been shoved into a box and forgotten about. The Tuohys never tried to enforce it, it was signed while the book was still in early gestation, and it’s not even clear that it played a role in the rights contracts twoish years later. There’s a weird logic leap in the petition where the conservatorship was apparently necessary to the outcome. But…it wasn’t?16 While Oher claims he never signed his rights agreement, the point is that the Tuohys didn’t sign it on his behalf in their own names. And if his signature was indeed forged (why?), that would still have been just as illegal. The conservatorship was an aside. While it theoretically blocked Oher from pursuing his own separate contract, we aren’t told he ever tried. Why would he? And when he did sign other contracts, the Tuohys don’t seem to have interfered..
At any rate, Oher seems emotional about finding out that he’s not really a Tuohy in a full legal sense. Taking him at his word, I’m empathetic. That said, they’ve been estranged since well before he claims to have found this out, and what seems a much clearer signal of the Tuohy’s views towards him is whether they kept him in the family will and trusts all these years. If they did, it’s hard to argue they didn’t consider him family. If they didn’t, it would be good to understand when and why that changed.
Questions of Stewardship
(Oher is mad about his portrayal in both versions of The Blind Side. He feels his “parents” should have done more to protect his image. The degree to which the Tuohys failed him here is is subjective. Oher has valid points, and readers can decide for themselves.)
Whether conservators or guardians or adopted parents, all these relationships require a minimum level of stewardship. How did the Tuohys do? Well, they clearly aced it on helping Oher with his education and day-to-day needs in both Memphis and Oxford (where Ole Miss is), and Oher glows throughout his 2011 book in describing feeling loved and embraced through gestures big and small.17
Where this breaks down is The Blind Side. The Tuohys were far more involved in shaping the narrative of both the book and film. In the first case, Michael Lewis and Sean Tuohy were childhood friends. In the second case, Oher was too busy with football to focus on it much (though it’s also unclear if he was ever invited to). Sean Tuohy also once claimed to have had script approval. If the Tuohys did indeed love Oher as a son, they ought to have been used their power to protect his image—which is something Oher seems to have long held varying levels of grudges about.
Those grudges seem to be mostly indexed on two interrelated specifics:
The movie had a cutesy-Disney-movie-sports-trope scene where Sean Junior (then a child) explains part of the high school playbook to Oher using a bunch of condiment bottles. Oher says this never happened, and that it caused people to question his football IQ. (While the movie didn’t come out until after Oher was drafted, many coaches, GMs, and peers would have seen it during his career.18 Also, the idea behind said scene was in the book as something Sean Tuohy said to Oher’s Ole Miss coach by way of analogy in recommending visual educational tactics for Oher. This does seem to have been a bad thing to say.)
Oher feels like the movie presented him as dumb. Same problem as above.
Now, was/is Oher dumb? No, definitely not. A core theme in Lewis’s book is that Oher had strong innate intelligence, and that too many disadvantaged kids like him are never given the proper support to activate this potential. Oher’s IQ was measured as 80 in grade school, and then in the 100-110 range in his senior year of high school (100 = average). And those were just the early fruits of his progress! He was always bright enough; he was just subjected to tests as a child that measured an education he’d never been given, not the raw stuff underneath.
That said, the movie mentions the 80 IQ part but not the 100-110 part. While it does show a teacher and a tutor and the Tuohys all arguing “no, Oher is actually much smarter than his grades” and the general tenor is them being proven right, explicitly bookending these numbers would have been much wiser. I think the Tuohys bear some blame here for not pushing for it.
(As an aside, a bunch of popular tweets are spreading a claim from Katie Couric’s website that Oher was academically gifted as a kid, which is what won him entry into a private high school. But this is exactly backwards. He was let in on academic probation despite his low grades. The upshot is that the community at Briarcrest saw past the grades and acted on a belief that said grades didn’t reflect the real Oher. And they were right! But this kind of take is very unhelpful.)
On White Saviorism
(Not going to TLDR this final section, nor will I offer any personal judgments on the underlying questions. Not my lane.)
There are thorny questions here—some that surfaced when the book/movie first came out, and more now. The largest: was it problematic for the Tuohys to build a social brand on helping poor Black kids? Even if it cost them more money than they gained by it (and though they originally did it quietly), when you’re rich reputation and legacy and status all matter more. That’s a lot of room for mixed motives.
One counterpoint: what would Oher’s path have looked like without them? As with all counterfactuals, we can’t know for sure. But can observe that Oher was not on a path for academic qualification for a D1 school. The Tuohys secured him some 20 hours of tutoring a week, and essentially hacked NCAA rules to give him a path via alternate qualifications to get his GPA up in time. This would have been nearly impossible for Oher to secure for himself. The system had left him too far behind.
Now, sure, Oher could have gone the junior college route. At some point his size, talent, and drive would have made a way for him. But all the way to the pros?
Quoting from The Blind Side:
The study [of Memphis inner-city athletes] revealed that, for every six public school kids with the ability to play college sports, five failed to qualify academically.
Oher’s path was easier because of the Tuohys, make of that what we will. Instead of rolling a loaded set of dice, he only needed to supply his own supreme effort.
Of course, it’s easy for those with helping instincts to overstep. That’s a classic issue with white saviorism. Instead of helping where the helpee is short on power, the savior helps where they can produce the most power, which of course isn’t the same thing. And instead of consulting, the savior informs—or just acts. Then there’s also the whole “ok now you conform to my culture” part.
How much of that was true here? It’s hard to tell from the outside. In his first book, Oher is effusive about the Tuohys having helped in more or less all the right ways. In the second book—written 12 years later, with a great deal more experience and reflection—Oher elects to only mention the Tuohys once. So we can infer some things from 2011 Oher, but without knowing quite how 2023 Oher feels about them.
In 2011 though, speaking of the basic idea of what the Tuohys offered in terms of cultural coaching:
[Michael Lewis] called his editor and pitched the story to him as a Pygmalion piece—a story about a young person from the poor side of town who has his life and opportunities turned around by learning what’s necessary to succeed in mainstream society. Ironically, that very same play would end up being one of my favorite pieces of literature I was studying around that same time.
And also:
[Leigh Anne’s] goal wasn’t to “fix” me, as if not knowing those things somehow made me broken. Not at all. She just wanted to make sure that I would feel comfortable in any situation, and I am glad that she did.
Leigh Anne echoed the same intent:
[I]f there is a fundamental misapprehension about Michael, it’s that he needed saving. As we got to know him during those first few weeks, we discovered that underneath his shyness, his foot shuffling, and his head ducking, he had a tremendous will to determine the course of his own life.
Now, it’s true that Leigh Anne absolutely Karened19 the shit out of some obstacles in Oher’s way. Her and Sean used their resources to bulldoze a path towards the opportunities he wanted, then turned it over to him. Was that wrong? In which way(s)? What should they have done and not done for him?
I leave these questions for the reader. And of course the fact that Oher had no problem with this dynamic in 2011 hardly denies him the right to recontextualize his experiences as a grown man, nor does it mean that the Tuohys’s critics aren’t right.
What I’ll say more broadly though is that there are systemic issues here that should obviously be our first priority It’s always better to attack problems at their source. In the same breath though, systemic changes are slow, hard, and collective work. We still have individual obligations to help those already affected by the system. The Tuohys chose to help Black kids who entered their mostly-white school—with lunch accounts, tuitions, and other forms of practical assistance. They chose to believe that this was a good thing, and further carried over this belief to their PR campaigns around their work. On one hand, this inspired their white peers to dig deeper, give more, and act more across racial lines. On the other hand, it did further a trope.
Again, I leave judgment here to the reader.
I emailed both SJ Tuohy and Martin Singer (one of the Tuohy family lawyers) on this question yesterday and didn’t get a reply from either by time of publication. I don’t take this as much of a signal either way.
I haven’t included examples here because my issue is with roughly…all of them? I’ve read through a few dozen and (at best) they took an “he said, they said” approach. But this isn’t good journalism! If I file a suit saying “Jimmy Carter intentionally ran over my cat” and he says “I don’t even drive, I’m 112”, the right headline isn’t “Jimmy Carter accused of feline homicide; he says he has no license”. The framing will lead people to over-weight the accusation, and it disadvantages the defense with a very compressed window of time to frame their response effectively. The job of the journalist (and their headline editor) is to weigh the credibility of the claim first, and if it clears some minimum bar to then find a headline / lede that’s proportional to the evidence behind the claim. But this petition didn’t clear any meaningful bar. It was facially extraordinary and didn’t carry nearly enough evidence to support the strength of accusation.
I’m always skeptical of headline numbers. The $200m+ figure (mostly sourced from this) is almost certainly overstated, as this may not account for some combination of partnership shares, net debt, taxes, and various transaction fees. We also know from Lewis’s book that the valuations of the underlying businesses fluctuated a lot over the years. Even so, it seems safe to assume that the Tuohys were at the very least sitting on many millions in net wealth.
A lot is rightly made of Miss Sue, who the Tuohys claim (in their book) they tried to hire to continue tutoring Oher at Ole Miss full-time, including moving expenses. But she wasn’t the only one. Their book also lists Jill Freeze and Liz Marable. Though these were all family friends, so it’s possible that none were paid. Even so, there’s at least a time and favor cost here. To imagine this was all invested for (again very theoretical) future royalty theft is, uh, difficult. It’s much more plausible that it was because: (1) they wanted Oher at Ole Miss, (2) they loved him. And disentangling those two motives is likely impossible from the outside.
Not even a single text/email with the family? No reach-outs to the studio, to Michael Lewis, etc? No attestations from an accountant? I half get saving some stuff for court, but like c’mon why did the press not ask for any of this?
“Defined net proceeds” doesn’t mean 2.5% of global box office (which would be $7.7m). First, because the studios only get ~40% of those returns in the first place. They then have to repay their project-specific production and marketing budgets as well as amortize some general costs, including all their failed projects. Those who bore the risk get paid first, with much larger shares. Even if the family’s contract accounted for eg DVDs, TV airings, and streaming, the back end here would have been quite modest relative to the box office numbers. It’s 2.5% of a small remainder pot, not 2.5% of the whole.
If these claims from a Tuohy lawyer are to be believed, other lawyers may have tried to explain to Oher in the past that he hasn’t really been wronged and this is just how Hollywood accounting works.
Worth noting that the family offered different (perhaps false) claims at least twice. Once in Sean’s initial statements to a local paper earlier this week (non-paywalled summary), and once in their book In a Heartbeat (“We had no participation in the [film’s] profits; we only received a fee for selling our name rights to Alcon, which all in all was not a large amount.”). While I don’t know what to make of the first one, their book was written in 2010 and the royalties may have still been future-tense at that point. Though AFAIK they’d already signed a participation agreement at that point? So that does at least seem like a lie.
There are a few on-record estimates now, all within striking distance of each other. One studio anon reported $700k to the family (pre-tax), and Michael Lewis claimed that his share (equal to the total distribution to the Tuohys and Oher combined) was $350k post taxes and fees. The Tuohys’s lawyers said in a presser yesterday that their total receipts were about $500k pre-tax, including an additional $70k initial payment that Lewis isn’t including in his number. When you factor that the studio also apparently made a $200k to a Tuohy family foundation (that was allegedly also offered in equal amount to Oher for a charity of his choice), we have a fairly tight range to work with here. While it could all be a concerted lie, that’s super difficult to believe just given how trivially verified all this is. Why would Lewis lie knowing the court is about to double-check? Risk-reward is totally upside-down. And per footnotes 6 and 12, the rights deal described fits right in this ballpark.
This last detail was confusing to me at first. Like a nice gesture, but kinda random? Then it finally clicked. I suspect this was to ensure his share of the payments wouldn’t run afoul of NCAA rules. See footnote 16 for a fuller explanation. If true, I half wonder if some of this dispute didn’t get more complicated because breaking it down fully would incidentally uncover that they’d conspired to game the NCAA (albeit to Oher’s benefit)?
If anything, I suspect that Oher and the Tuohys got quite a good deal here in relative terms, likely thanks to Michael Lewis.
This is also a super common story in music and book publishing. Some newcomer will sign a contract, absolutely smash it, then complain that their cut was too small. The system is designed this way on purpose, and it exists—very intentionally and very thoughtfully—to ensure that publishers and studios can take risks on new talent and new stories. When promising projects tank, as a supermajority always do, advances don’t get clawed back. And when a project does take off, all those other failed projects still need to be paid for. This will feel unfair! “My project won, the losers should have won like me!” But if you take a holistic view, you want a system that can take a lot of higher-risk fliers. Which is exactly the kind of system that can make a movie like The Blind Side.
Quoting from his book: “…they really ought to go through the process of formally adopting him”. Now this could have been true, in that it could have been their original intent at the time, where they were subsequently guided into the conservatorship option for whatever non-evil reason. There are also three later quotes that imply that others perceived it as an adoption, with no footnotes. Lewis otherwise only refers to them becoming Oher’s legal guardians (which was true separately from the conservatorship thing). So bit of a mixed bag. Lewis certainly should have been clearer, and/or more curious.
Speaking as a Canadian, US booster culture is so fucking weird. The idea that (looking at this from a cynical interpretation) a family might spend tens of thousands of dollars and make false promises of love just so a guy would play for their alma mater is…what????
Leigh Anne pushed Oher hard to maintain contact with his mother, made sure she was included in the whole conservatorship process, gave her a job, and even gave her money for “a nice church dress” for a high school game night where player parents walked their kids across the field. (The last two anecdotes came from Oher, not the Tuohys.)
The argument here is that the Tuohy’s signed one agreement where they got compensation, then they nudged/coerced Oher into signing a separate agreement where he got none. But they could have done this anyway with or without the conservatorship? And there are other questions here. Like whether Oher was even eligible to sign an independent contract that included compensation (even future-dated) while still an NCAA athlete? And how he could have possibly expected to leverage a better deal on his own at 20? The way I read this is that the family (maybe without consulting Oher much) signed a deal that provided them the compensation (for NCAA reasons), and they then passed on his share as a “gift” (from the IRS’s POV; hence why they paid the taxes on it) per their internal agreement on splits. They then encouraged him to sign his own $0 deal so that the studio was covered and the NCAA was happy, knowing that he’d get his 20% payment share from them directly. (I guess they could be lying about having passed on those checks faithfully/consistently? But seems a very dumb thing to lie about this week in detail given how trivial it would be to verify. Why arm Oher’s lawyers with that bazooka vs. saying eg. “oops accounting mistake”)
This continued on into his NFL career too. As one example, Leigh Anne helped him find an apartment in Baltimore after he got drafted and then decorated and furnished it for him.
What’s less obvious to me though is how seriously coaches and GMs would take it given that they had far more relevant data to work on. Like I can see from Oher’s POV how getting questions and comments about it from other players his whole career would really suck. But did it inhibit his career from the POV of those evaluating his talent? Hard to see why it would? At that point they had game tape, internal evals, could call other coaches, etc.
Shout-out to Mike Solana for pointing out recently that there is a side to Karen-ing that’s actually a civic good. In re-watching the movie, Leigh Anne was most of the charm. Here is this woman that on any lesser mission could be a menace. But apply those same instincts towards a nobler end and it actually unlocks a lot of good.