“That’s where Hurt Village was.” Michael Oher was pointing to the site of a now-demolished housing project where he lived with his mother, who was addicted to drugs, and, at various times, as many as seven of his 11 siblings. It was an overcast Monday afternoon in late April, and Oher, the former football player whose high school years were dramatized in the movie “The Blind Side,” was driving me on a tour through a forlorn-looking stretch of Memphis and past some of the landmarks of his childhood. “And right over there, that was a store called Chism Trail. It’s one of the places I’d steal from. Real food, not candy. Pizza, hot dogs, bologna. One time I took a ham.”
Listen to this article, read by Ron ButlerOher played eight seasons as a starting offensive tackle in the N.F.L. and won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens. He is now 38, and his neatly trimmed beard has a few flecks of gray. He is 6-foot-5 and says he is under his playing weight of 315 pounds. We were in his GMC Denali pickup, a big truck to accommodate his big frame.
“Here’s where the sisters lived,” he said as we turned a corner, gesturing toward a rambling house with a picnic table out front. This was the home for nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, an order founded by Mother Teresa. “We’d go there, and they would feed us. I’ll never forget it, because it’s the first time I had lemon meringue pie.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWe drove from what is known as Uptown Memphis to the more prosperous East Side and to a place that Oher pointed to with pride: a spot along a six-lane highway where, beginning when he was 7, he sold Sunday newspapers. “You couldn’t be lazy and just sit on the crate like some of the other kids would do,” he told me. “You had to walk around. You had to get up and wave the paper. I sold the most newspapers out of anyone.”
Our last stop was a stately yellow home, framed by two tall oaks. He pulled halfway up the driveway. “This is where I lived with my family,” Oher said. He turned to me and, to make sure I got the joke, added: “You know what I mean, right? My family.”
This was where Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy lived with their two children — and, for about a year, with Oher. The Tuohys took him shopping for clothes, helped him get a driver’s license, bought him a pickup truck and arranged for tutoring that boosted his grades and made him eligible to play college football.
The charity they extended, a wealthy white couple taking in a formerly homeless Black teenager, is the basis of “The Blind Side.” Based on Michael Lewis’s 2006 nonfiction book of the same name, the movie came out in the fall of 2009, less than a year into Barack Obama’s first term as president, and audiences largely embraced it as a parable of hope and racial harmony.
Oher is now suing the Tuohys. Last August, in the Probate Court of Shelby County, Tenn., Oher’s lawyers filed a suit claiming that the Tuohys have exploited him by using his name, image and likeness to promote speaking engagements that have earned them roughly $8 million over the last two decades — and by repeatedly saying that they had adopted him, when they never did. The Tuohys have claimed in response that Oher in recent years has attempted to extort them with “menacing” texts.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe lawsuit shocked many who saw the movie and led to a deluge of worldwide media coverage, with news stories often referring to Oher and the Tuohys as “‘The Blind Side’ family.” “We’re devastated,” Sean Tuohy told a reporter from The Daily Memphian on the day the suit was filed. “It’s upsetting to think we would make money off any of our children. But we’re going to love Michael at 37 just like we loved him at 16.” The Tuohys have not spoken publicly since then, and they declined to talk to me for this article.
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I visited Oher twice during the spring, first in Nashville, where he lives with his wife, Tiffany, and their five children, and then in Memphis. These were the first times he had talked publicly since filing suit against the Tuohys. He was, at all times, resolute. He believes he was wronged both by the couple who took him in and by a movie that made him into a cartoon image he doesn’t recognize. But he was also self-aware enough to know that many people would not take his side. In our conversations, he sometimes seemed to check himself. “There I go, pouting again, right?” he said at one point as he recounted his grievances against the Tuohys. “I know that’s what some people are going to think. ‘He’s being ungrateful.’ ”
The couple’s lawyers argue that the Tuohys have a right to tell the story of their family and that Oher is part of that story. Oher’s lawyers counter that without Oher, the Tuohys would never have had a profitable story to tell. The case is moving slowly. The Tuohys have filed for a partial summary judgment, a routine motion to have some of the claims in the case dismissed; a hearing on that has been scheduled for Oct. 1. If the case reaches trial, it probably will not do so until next year.
Even then, the outcome of the legal proceedings may not provide a clear picture of the relationships among the people involved. It might even be that the positions taken by each side — one claiming to have been exploited, the other extorted — are both true. That would make this chapter of “The Blind Side,” its epilogue, less a fairy tale of racial reconciliation and more a classic American story of money, misunderstanding and ruptured relationships.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTLeigh Anne and Sean Tuohy met at the University of Mississippi, known as Ole Miss, where he was a star basketball player and she was a cheerleader. They became modern Memphis royalty — founding members of their evangelical church, owners of a private jet they called Air Taco. Sean made a fortune from his ownership of more than 100 fast-food franchises, mainly Taco Bells, KFCs and Long John Silver’s. He sold most of them in 2019 for $213 million. The couple sent their children to the private school Leigh Anne attended, Briarcrest Christian, founded in 1973, the same year Memphis implemented a court-ordered busing plan to desegregate its public schools. Their daughter, Collins, would marry the scion of another prominent Memphis family, Cannon Smith, the son of the billionaire FedEx founder Fred Smith.
Oher came from another world entirely. While moving between foster homes, his mother’s house and a Salvation Army shelter — and sometimes the streets — he missed long stretches of his school years, and his academic record suffered. But he was a promising athlete. He was not just large; he was also unusually fast and nimble. A youth basketball coach named Tony Henderson succeeded in enrolling him in Briarcrest before his 10th-grade year, along with his own son, Steve, who was a year younger. Oher lived with the Hendersons for a time, and then in the home of another Black classmate, Quinterio Franklin. At some point during his time at Briarcrest — exactly when has become a point of contention — he moved in with the Tuohys.
In the movie, the country singer Tim McGraw plays a laconic but canny Sean Tuohy. Sandra Bullock won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Leigh Anne as a Southern tiger mom who makes Oher her cause. In one scene, she storms out of a lunch with her friends when one of them presses her on why she thinks it’s safe to have Oher living in the house with her teenage daughter. In another, a local gang leader who has a beef with Oher says to her: “Tell him to sleep with one eye open. You hear me, bitch?” She responds: “No, you hear me, bitch. You threaten my son, you threaten me.” She lets him know she’s in a prayer group with the district attorney and is a member of the N.R.A. — and “I’m always packin’.”
The Michael Oher of the movie, played by a lesser-known actor, Quinton Aaron, is passive and hardly speaks. He displays none of the grit of a child who survived for many years on his own and seems to have no friends, not even among his high school football teammates. This version of Oher is helpless and alone until the Tuohys get involved.
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Oher did not even want to see the movie, which came out when he was just months into his N.F.L. career. He already felt that Lewis’s book, published three years earlier, had cost him a higher draft position — and the increased money that goes with it — by creating the impression that he was stupid. “The N.F.L. people were wondering if I could read a playbook,” he told me.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTA month or so after the movie’s premiere, the Ravens’ team chaplain persuaded Oher to see it with him and two teammates at a theater in Baltimore. “It’s hard to describe my reaction,” he told me. “It seemed kind of funny to me, to tell you the truth, like it was a comedy about someone else. It didn’t register. But social media was just starting to grow, and I started seeing stuff that I’m dumb. I’m stupid. Every article about me mentioned ‘The Blind Side,’ like it was part of my name.” He worries now that the movie will have a negative impact on his children. “If my kids can’t do something in class, will their teacher think, Their dad is dumb — is that why they’re not getting it?”
Follow The New York TimesFind us on Instagram for the best of our visual journalism and beyond.Join our WhatsApp Channel for breaking news, games, recipes and more.Connect with us on Facebook to get the best of The Times, right in your feed.“The Blind Side” earned more than $300 million at the box office, and it brought widespread fame to the Tuohys. In 2014, they were interviewed at Baylor University by its then president, Kenneth Starr; earlier guests at his on-campus speakers series included Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, and Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court justice. Later, the Tuohys appeared on an episode of the reality TV series “Below Deck” — the crew of a luxury yacht staged a tailgate-themed party for them on a Caribbean beach.
The limelight mainly focused on Leigh Anne, an interior decorator who began giving speeches for as much as $50,000 per engagement. She delivered a keynote address in 2018 at a United Way event in North Carolina, where previous years’ speakers included Soledad O’Brien and Maya Angelou. She continued to give speeches into 2023; an event scheduled for last November promoted her as “the adoptive mother of N.F.L. football star Michael Oher.”
This has been their consistent characterization of the relationship with Oher. In public appearances and in their 2010 book, “In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving,” the Tuohys have referred to him as their son and themselves as his adoptive parents. But they never adopted him. Instead, when he was 18, Sean and Leigh Anne petitioned to establish a conservatorship that gave them control over his finances and major life decisions; the legal measure was approved by a judge, despite the Tuohys acknowledging at the time that Oher had no known physical or psychological disabilities, which Tennessee state law requires be present for a conservatorship to be granted. It remained in force for two decades, through the end of his N.F.L. career, though it is not clear how the Tuohys exercised the power it gave them. Oher’s lawyers claim that the conservatorship gave the Tuohys a responsibility to look after his interests and put them above their own, and instead, they profited off him.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOher’s lawsuit included a request to end the conservatorship, and the Probate Court judge, Kathleen Gomes, quickly dissolved it. (The Tuohys did not oppose the request.) She opened the hearing by saying that she had been a lawyer for decades, mostly practicing in the area of probate and conservatorship, and a judge for 10 years. “And in all my 43 years, I have never, ever seen a conservatorship being opened for someone who was not disabled,” she said from the bench. What will be litigated, assuming the case goes forward is Oher’s demand for unspecified monetary damages for the Tuohys’ alleged misuse of his name, image and likeness in promoting their public appearances.
The tangle and emotional complexities, even contradictions, at play among Oher and the Tuohys are evident in the fact that even today, Oher fondly recalls his time with the Tuohys. “Honestly, it was great. I had a bed to stay on. I was eating good. They got me a truck.” In his own book, published in 2011 and titled “I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to ‘The Blind Side’ and Beyond,” Oher includes this dedication: “To the Tuohy family, you are truly a blessing to me. Thank you for helping me to turn my dreams into reality.” Later in the book he writes, “The more time I spent with that family, the more time I felt like I had found a home.”
In the Tuohys’ book, after recounting how they learned that Oher would be named the No. 1 football recruit in the nation in the spring of his junior year, they write: “Suddenly, it seemed, we had the most sought-after football player in the country living in an upstairs bedroom.” They continued: “But the biggest event for all of us that spring was our adoption of Michael.” Oher says he did not move in with the Tuohys until that summer. It may seem like a small discrepancy, but his timing would not place him in the Tuohy home until he was already one of the most coveted college football recruits in the country. In our conversations, Oher referred several times to the Tuohys’ “narrative” and said that he had gone along with it for many years because telling a different story, and one at odds with the hit movie, seemed like more than he was capable of while he was devoting himself to the hard work of playing pro football.
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Leigh Anne Tuohy, in an affidavit, has said that the use of the word adopted “was always meant in its colloquial sense, to describe the family relationship we felt with Mr. Oher; it was never meant as a legal term of art.” In Tennessee and in 27 other states and Washington, D.C., it’s legal to adopt an adult. It sometimes happens for estate-planning purposes or so one of the parties can play a role in making decisions about medical care and other issues. Oher was 18, legally an adult, when the conservatorship was established in December of his senior year of high school. “Adoption doesn’t have a colloquial meaning, and it’s not a word you throw around lightly,” one of Oher’s lawyers, Anne Johnson, told me. “As an 18-year-old, he was told that he was made a part of the family. He believed that, but it wasn’t true.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTEven before the movie and the invitations to give paid speeches, the Tuohys seemed to derive at least one benefit from welcoming Oher into their home: He chose to play football at Ole Miss, where they were major donors to the athletic program, or “boosters” in the argot of the National Collegiate Athletics Association. Since 2014, the practice facility for the men’s and women’s basketball teams has been known as the Tuohy Basketball Center.
The couple have never denied that they hoped Oher would play football at Ole Miss, but they have insisted that he made the choice on his own. In their telling, the conservatorship was a way to demonstrate to the N.C.A.A. that they did not exert influence over a nonfamily member by showering him with gifts. If the N.C.A.A., which sets eligibility rules for college sports, had concluded that was the case, it most likely would not have allowed Oher to play at Ole Miss. But after its investigation, it essentially decided to consider Oher as a member of the Tuohy family. When I asked Oher about his school choice, he told me that “it was kind of like osmosis. It became where I was going to go. But I want to be clear that I don’t regret it.”
One of Oher’s fondest childhood memories is the several weeks he spent in a psychiatric unit at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis. He had become a ward of the state after child-welfare authorities determined that his mother could not care for him; he was committed to the hospital, as a 10- or 11-year-old, after he kept running away from foster homes and back to his mother. “That was the best time of my life up until then,” he says. “I was eating three meals a day. I had my own room, a TV and a VCR, and I was watching all kinds of movies.”
He kept running away even after he got out, and at some point, Oher figured, the authorities stopped looking for him. He was in and out of school and spent his happiest hours playing basketball in church gyms and football in a nearby park. “You would see Michael and then you wouldn’t,” Craig Vail, Oher’s closest childhood friend from Hurt Village, told me. “If he wasn’t around, I just figured he moved away, and then he’d come back, and we’d pick up on where we were and play together.” Oher steered clear of serious trouble. “If Michael didn’t like it, he wasn’t following along,” Vail says.
Quinterio Franklin, who played on the football and basketball teams at Briarcrest, lived on a country road, across the state line in Mississippi. “When Michael came to Briarcrest, I was like, ‘Cool, another Black guy,’ ” Franklin told me. “It was natural that we got close, because there weren’t many of us. He was a jokester, a people person, a lively personality.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen I spoke to Franklin’s stepfather, Anthony Burrow, about Oher’s time in their household, he told me: “From my grandmom on up, we have always taken people into the family. Mike was a great kid, and he had spent the night once or twice with us. When Terio asked me about him staying with us full time, I called my sister, and she said, ‘It is a privilege when someone asks that of you.’ So he came over and made himself at home. We had four-wheelers and he became an avid four-wheeler. Everyone got to know him. He and Terio were like two peas in a pod.”
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Oher lived with their family full time for roughly a year. It was the last place he lived before moving in with the Tuohys. “He somehow persuaded another Black kid on the Briarcrest basketball team, Quinterio Franklin, to let him use his house as a kind of base camp,” Lewis writes. Leigh Anne drove Oher there one night after a track meet, the book continues. “It was a trailer,” she says — squalid quarters Oher needed to be rescued from. “That’s it,” she then tells Oher. “Get all your crap. You’re moving in with me.” After he lugs his belongings out in a garbage bag, she orders a “cleansing of the clothes.”
Until that moment, Lewis writes: “Leigh Anne had hoped that what they and other Briarcrest families had done for Michael added up to something like a decent life. Now that she knew it didn’t, she took over the management of that life. Completely.”
Oher drove me to see where he lived with Terio’s family. The house was at the end of a gravel driveway, off a winding lane called Church of Christ Road. It was not a trailer, but rather one of the prefabricated houses, common in the South, known as “Jim Walter Homes.” They were assembled on site, and buyers had to own the land. Burrow said the house was first owned by his grandparents and that it had four bedrooms. “When you’re rich and you have certain things, I imagine you have a different way of looking at the world,” he said. “Maybe it did look like a trailer to Ms. Tuohy.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBurrow, who owns a small flooring company, said he understood why Oher left his family. “They gave him monetary gifts, took him shopping. He’s a kid, a young Black man who has had nothing. He’s going to run with that.”
I reached out to Joseph Crone, another high school teammate and now a lawyer. “It was common knowledge he was living with Terio for a long time,” he told me. “They always came to school together. Before that, he lived with Steve” — whose father, Tony Henderson, first encouraged Oher to enroll in Briarcrest. “Right up to the start of summer practice before our senior year, I feel like he was kind of couch-surfing. He stayed with me a few times. He stayed with other guys too. We were all teammates so there was that level of comfort. We’d be like, ‘Hey, buddy, come crash at my house.’”
Oher was introduced to the wider world by one of America’s foremost nonfiction authors. Michael Lewis’s books tend to be about big systems and money — “Moneyball,” “The Big Short” and “Going Infinite,” for example — and he tells his stories through characters who are iconoclastic, even heroic. They see into the future in ways that others can’t. At about the same time that he was researching the importance of the left-tackle position in football (which protects a right-handed quarterback’s “blindside”) and the economic resources that N.F.L. teams devote to the position, he discovered that an old friend, Sean Tuohy, his classmate at a New Orleans private school from kindergarten through 12th grade, had a potential N.F.L. left tackle living in his house. The Tuohys and Michael Oher became his characters.
The book, which was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, set everything into motion: the movie, the fame of its real-life characters and the current dispute. Without it, the Tuohys most likely would be little-known outside of Memphis and Oher would be no more famous than most of the other N.F.L. players who toiled as offensive linemen. It’s not uncommon for filmmakers to embellish the real-life stories they find in books, and “The Blind Side” movie certainly did. But the movie is faithful to the book’s tone — both are told through the Tuohys’ perspective, with Oher virtually silent — and both movie and book depart from reality in ways that exalt the Tuohys and, in Oher’s view, diminish him.
In the movie, Oher is the rare American male who knows so little about football that he must have it explained to him by a child: 10-year-old Sean Tuohy Jr., who moves a ketchup bottle and other condiments and spices around on a kitchen table to show him how players are positioned on the field. The scene is not in the book. But in Lewis’s rendering, Oher has no idea how to play when he first takes the field for Briarcrest. “When he’d been thrown into games during his junior year,” Lewis writes, “he had spent most of his time wandering around the field in search of someone to fall over.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBut this was the same season, his junior year, that Oher was named to the All-Metro team by The Commercial Appeal, the primary daily newspaper in Memphis. He keeps an image of the newspaper story in his cellphone. It’s more than a memento; it’s proof to him that he amounted to something, and was recognized for it, before the Tuohys intervened in his life. It was after that season that he was identified as one of the top college-football recruits in the nation.
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Oher was a teenager finishing up high school, and then a freshman at Ole Miss, when Lewis was doing his research. Oher told me that he did not understand at the time why someone was interested in his story or how he would fit into the book. “I talked to him a little,” he said of Lewis, when I asked about his involvement.
Passages of the book now read as off-key. In characterizing Oher’s otherness at the wealthy and almost all-white Briarcrest school, Lewis describes him, variously, as “this huge Black kid” and “as lost as a Martian stumbling out of a crash landing.” His mother, Denise Oher, is “very large and very Black,” and in a brief meeting with her son Michael and Leigh Anne, she slurs her words and wears a “muumuu and a garish wig.” Sean Tuohy, who pitched in as an assistant football coach at Briarcrest, is credited by Lewis with a magical ability to instill confidence in teenage boys. He was said to reach out especially to the school’s few Black athletes. “I married a man who doesn’t know his own color,” he quotes Leigh Anne as saying.
After Oher learns that his father is dead — apparently having been thrown off a highway overpass — Leigh Anne tells him it might be for the best. “You didn’t know the man,” she says in Lewis’s book, and “one way or another, you are going to have money, and you know that he would have found you and made claims upon you.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn April, I met Lewis at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. When I asked him what he believes caused the relationships to fracture among the people depicted in “The Blind Side,” he responded by talking about the economics of his book. “Let me give you the data points,” he said. “The book did poorly. It never found its market. Football people don’t really read books, compared to baseball people. And if they’re going to read one, they don’t want a chick flick in the middle of it.”
Hollywood, Lewis said, did not initially have strong interest in the book. But the film ultimately was produced by Alcon Entertainment, whose controlling shareholder and chairman of the board is Fred Smith, the FedEx founder and now the father-in-law of the Tuohys’ daughter.
Oher contends that he did not benefit fairly from the movie. Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, in a response filed in the Tennessee court, state that the movie money was split five ways, with equal shares also going to the couple and their two biological children — a deal they say Oher verbally agreed to. He did not have his own lawyer representing him. The movie money was supposed to be paid directly to the Tuohys, then be distributed to the others.
Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, in court documents, say that Oher’s one-fifth share has come to just over $138,000. “You know they did not steal his movie money, right?” Lewis said to me. “This whole thing starts with that. It starts with a lie. I would just be very suspicious about everything else.”
Lewis focused on the material benefits Oher got from the Tuohys. “Did you get a sense of how much money they spent on him when he was living with them? They bought him a truck. They bought him clothes. They housed him.” He continued: “There’s not a whiff of possibility the Tuohys are going to milk money off Michael Oher. You’ve gotta sort of know more about them. They’re rich. And generous. They aren’t stingy rich people. They’re openhanded rich people.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen I brought up aspects of his book that I believed were inaccurate — among them, that Oher barely knew how to play football when he first came to live with the Tuohys — Lewis said that he was confident that the people who witnessed Oher’s story in real time had provided him with an accurate account. I told him I had seen Terio Franklin’s house and that I did not think its description as a trailer that served as Oher’s temporary base camp was correct. “You should ask the Tuohys about that,” he replied.
In a profile of Lewis in The Guardian last October, he seemed to attribute Oher’s “change of behavior,” as he put it, to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease that afflicts some football players, which can only be diagnosed after death, through a brain autopsy. “This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head,” he said. “They run into problems with violence and aggression.” Lewis told me his inference that Oher had C.T.E. was made in anger, and he regretted it, but he then repeated it. “It should be part of the conversation about Michael Oher,” he said.
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Last year, not long before he filed his lawsuit, Oher published a second book, “When Your Back’s Against the Wall.” In it, he writes that the story people think they know about him makes it look “like I was sitting there waiting for a handout” and discounts “the years of survival, resisting the streets, making the most of myself.” Lewis, however, said he was told that without the Tuohys, Oher was headed for a life of destitution, or crime, even though Oher had no history of anything of the sort. “This is what everyone told me,” he said. “He was on a course that was very bad. He was going be a bodyguard for a gang in Hurt Village.”
It was not always clear to me whether Oher felt betrayed more by the Tuohys or by the movie. This is understandable, given the extensive overlaps between the filmmakers and the Tuohy family. The movie was based on their friend’s book, produced by the company controlled by their daughter’s future father-in-law and executive-produced by his daughter. The daughter of another family friend, the lawyer who represented them in the conservatorship, appeared in a small role in the movie. Sean Tuohy has seemed to suggest that he had the right to approve the script. “I had to give them the rights to use our name,” he said, while sitting at dinner with the captain of the yacht in the 2017 “Below Deck” episode. “And I said, ‘I’ll give you the rights to use the name if I get to read the script and approve it or unapprove it.’ ”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSandra Bullock spent time with Leigh Anne Tuohy in order to get to know the character she would be playing. Tim McGraw met Sean on the set. The first time Quinton Aaron met Oher was in the tunnel leading to the field before a Ravens game — after the movie came out. “I was told that it might be better that way,” Aaron told me. “I can’t remember if it was the director or one of the producers, but they said he was a young homeless kid in the movie, but that’s not who he is now. At the time, he was getting ready for the N.F.L.” Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy attended the 2009 movie premiere in New York and the Academy Awards in Hollywood the following March. Oher went to neither. He told me that he could not recall if he was invited to either event but would have declined if he had been.
Oher now feels duped by the Tuohys. He enjoyed the comforts of their home, but while he was off at their alma mater playing football, the couple and their friends and associates took part in a project that is likely to follow him the rest of his life. “The first time I heard ‘I love you,’ it was Sean and Leigh Anne saying it,” he told me. “When that happens at 18, you become vulnerable. You let your guard down and then you get everything stripped from you. It turns into a hurt feeling.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t want to make this about race, but what I found out was that nobody says ‘I love you’ more than coaches and white people. When Black people say it, they mean it.”
“The Blind Side” brought attention and pride to the Briarcrest community, but the falling out among its protagonists has caused many to feel caught in the middle. The principal who agreed to enroll Oher declined to comment for this article. Hugh Freeze, Briarcrest’s coach at the time, took a job on the football staff of Ole Miss before Oher’s freshman season and is now the head coach at Auburn, his fifth college head-coaching job; he’s on a six-year contract that pays him $6.5 million annually. “Michael is dear to our family,” he replied by email while declining my request for an interview.
Oher has a legal team of four lawyers behind him, including Don Barrett, who is based in Lexington, Miss., and who was one of the lead plaintiffs’ lawyers in the first settlement of the lawsuits against the tobacco industry. “Sean and Leigh Anne self-dealed in every way you could imagine,” he told me.
The Tuohys are represented by two Tennessee lawyers, neither of whom would comment for this article. A prominent Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Martin Singer, who has acted as their spokesman, issued a statement after the lawsuit was filed. “Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that the outlandish claims made by Michael Oher about the Tuohy family are hurtful and absurd,” it said. “The idea that the Tuohys have ever sought to profit off Mr. Oher is not only offensive, it is transparently ridiculous.” He characterized the lawsuit as a “shakedown effort.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTI asked the Tuohys, through a representative they are working with, if they would refer me to friends I could contact who might tell their side of the story. They declined. They also declined to answer written questions or participate in the fact-checking of this article. Andrew Kosove, the co-chief executive (with Broderick Johnson) of Alcon Entertainment, told me that he was saddened by the dispute and did not understand why Oher believes he was owed more money from the movie. “No one did anything dishonest,” he says. “Leigh Anne and Sean love Michael. That is the tragedy of this story. There is pain to go around. My prayer and Broderick’s prayer is that ultimately there will be a reconciliation, because I believe these are people who love each other.”
The careers of professional athletes typically do not last beyond their 30s, at which point many of them struggle to grasp who they are without their sport. I got the sense that for Oher, whose whole life has been a battle against long odds, that feeling was amplified. After he left the N.F.L. in 2017, he finally had time to look back, and little of what he saw made sense. Most of his siblings, he told me, “chose the streets.” The success he achieved was quickly accompanied by a bizarre and disorienting kind of fame — one in which everyone knew his story, except that it wasn’t actually his story.
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When we talked, his tone was usually matter-of-fact, almost stoic. He did not display emotion, but he sometimes referred to events in the past as having been painful. The release of the movie just as he was starting his N.F.L. career was a big blow. “That’s my heartbreak right there,” he said. “It was as soon as I got there, I was defined.”
He played eight seasons of pro football, a long career by N.F.L. standards. He began with a goal of making the Hall of Fame; a knee injury, a concussion and chronic migraines led to his leaving the league. He said that drugs prescribed for his headaches caused him to gain 100 pounds and that he spent a couple of years only periodically venturing out of his house and sometimes not even leaving his bedroom.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn 2017, he was charged with a misdemeanor assault after a physical altercation with an Uber driver. The charge was later dismissed, but the incident, and the fact that it made the news, filled him with shame. Oher described to me another moment, two years later: He was on a flight to a medical appointment, could not fasten his seatbelt and feared he might be removed from the plane. “I’m like, ‘Man, I’m going to be in the news — Michael Oher kicked off a plane for being too fat.’ ” A flight attendant brought him a seatbelt extender. He changed his diet, went back to the gym and, as he put it, restored himself to “not my playing shape, but normal-person shape.”
He said that he believed his separation from football would have gone more smoothly if he had been healthy when he left the game. I suggested that maybe after the life he had led — moving from home to home; stealing food to survive; fighting his way up through Briarcrest and into the N.F.L. — he just found himself mentally exhausted when all the striving stopped. “You hit it on the head,” he said. “That’s a big component of it.”
He earned $34 million from the three teams he played for, according to the website Over the Cap, which tracks N.F.L. salaries. “I worked hard for that moment when I was done playing, and saved my money so I could enjoy the time,” he said after I mentioned that many people would believe he had filed the lawsuit because he needed money. “I’ve got millions of dollars. I’m fine.”
In a response filed in court, Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy claim that Oher had become “increasingly estranged” from them and began demanding money. He referred to the Tuohys as “thieves” in one of the texts that the couple’s lawyers included in court filings. “If something isn’t resolve this Friday, I’m going to go ahead and tell the world, how I was robbed by my suppose to be parents,” he wrote in another. In a third text, he said, “Get with Fred and get my money together” — a reference to Fred Smith, the Alcon chairman.
I asked Oher about the texts. “I was just still trying to figure things out,” he said. “I didn’t think anything of it.” He claimed the texts “lit a fuse,” and he started receiving checks for the movie for the first time. The Tuohys’ lawyers have said Oher had already been receiving royalty checks, a claim he denies.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOher spends his time, in part, taking his children to their sporting events, and as we drove around Memphis, I could hear the chairs and tent he sets up on the sidelines of their games rattling around in the back of his truck. The Ohers have a foundation that raises money to provide scholarships and mentors to disadvantaged children in Nashville. He also spends a considerable amount of time at the gym. “I feel like there’s one more time when I can get in elite shape,” he said. When I asked why that was important, he said: “I’ll feel good. I’ll walk around happier. I’ll have that confidence it gives you.”
The lawsuit, it seemed to me, is part of a different kind of rebuilding project, an effort to make himself emotionally whole. Several times he referred to having been “robbed” by the Tuohys, which I came to understand as having a double meaning: robbed of money and perhaps, even more so, robbed of an identity.
But why had it taken him so long to go public and file the lawsuit? Why now? “Pro football’s a hard job,” he said. “You have to be locked in 100 percent. I went along with their narrative because I really had to focus on my N.F.L. career, not things off the field.” Away from the game, his focus turned to what he believed was his fair share of the money generated by the movie and the myths spawned by it.
“For a long time, I was so angry mentally,” he said. “With what I was going through. I want to be the person I was before ‘The Blind Side,’ personality-wise. I’m still working on it.”
Joshua Rashaad McFadden, a visual artist and assistant professor of photography at Rochester Institute of Technology, has received International Photography Awards for ‘‘After Selma,’’ ‘‘Come to Selfhood’’ and ‘‘Unrest in America,’’ as well as a 2023 Lucie Photo Book Prize.
Read by Ron Butler
Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan
Engineered by Devin Murphybonustime