The Blind Side ’s Cringey White Savior Complex May Have Been Way Darker Than We Knew

Michael Oher, former NFL offensive tackle, Super Bowl champion, and the inspiration behind 2010 best picture nominee The Blind Side, is taking his “adoptive” parents Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy to court. His gripe? Allegedly, they operated a yearslong scheme to separate him from revenue derived by his name, likeness, and life story. I put adoptive in quotation marks here because one of the core accusations in Oher’s petition is that the Tuohys never actually attained parental guardianship of him in the first place. Instead, he alleges, they were conservators, not adopters, in the archetypical Britney Spears tradition—and Oher is claiming that he didn’t know about the distinction until this year. Now he wants the conservatorship removed so he can take back direct control over his life.

This is a big story, and we’re going to cover all of it. Oher had a pretty solid NFL career, but The Blind Side made him a household name, and this legal kerfuffle undoubtedly recontextualizes his whole story. It also lays bare how easily Americans bought into the hackneyed, saccharine, white-savior tropes the film happily exploited to the tune of a $309 million net gross. The Blind Side has already aged poorly, but in light of these new allegations, it could look even worse.

Before we get into all of that, though, we first need to get a better understanding of our characters.

Who is Michael Oher?

He’s an offensive tackle who played for three teams across a seven-year professional football career. Oher had an extremely tough upbringing—he was one of 12 children born to an alcoholic mother and an out-of-the-picture father in Memphis, Tennessee—to the point of experiencing periods of homelessness in his youth. However, he showed a lot of promise as a high school football prospect while in the foster care system during his teenage years. Enter Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, a Memphis couple whose son and daughter attended the same high school as Oher. He had bounced around a variety of different benefactors during his first few years at the school, but in 2004, the Tuohys, who are white, invited Oher, who is Black and was then 18, to live with them. All of this was dramatized in The Blind Side.

These are the same people Oher is taking to court, right?

Yes. And that’s where his story and The Blind Side diverge. For years, it appeared that the Tuohys did formally adopt Oher, bringing him into the family in a Lifetime-ish triumph of interracial harmony.

Oher’s petition, reviewed by Slate, claims that the adoption never happened. Yes, Oher says, the Tuohys opened their home to him, and yes, Leigh Anne frequently took him shopping, and even told him that she loved him in a distinctly motherly way, but the couple never officialized their adoption. Instead, according to the petition, the Tuohys presented Oher with paperwork that he assumed was adoption measures, but was instead a conservatorship. Oher says he wasn’t aware of the distinction until this past February, 19 years after signing. (The petition doesn’t say how he found out.)

So, what is a conservatorship, exactly? Is it different from the Britney Spears thing?

They come in all shapes and sizes, but basically, a conservatorship gives some other figure—usually a guardian—some semblance of authority over someone deemed to be not capable of managing their own affairs. Oher, it should be said, is not mentally or physically handicapped, as is often the case in a conservatorship, and spent three years at Ole Miss before starting his professional career—all of which occurred after the conservatorship was instituted.

The ramifications of this would be pretty serious. Oher’s petition includes one quotation from the conservatorship, penned back in 2004, that disallows him from negotiating “any contracts … without the direct approval of his guardians/conservators.” This would seem to imply that the Tuohys have had to approve every contract he’s had as an adult, perhaps even the ones he signed with the NFL (though we don’t yet know if they actually have had any such say or if they played a role in approving his contracts). It should be reiterated that Oher is now a 37-year-old man.

Man, that doesn’t sound good at all.

I know, right? But it might not be quite that simple. In Oher’s petition, he claims that the Tuohys did tell him he was signing a conservatorship but that he was led to believe that it functioned the same as an adoption. In the petition, he’s essentially saying he wasn’t aware there was a difference between the two when he was 18.

Is there any chance this was an honest mistake or some sort of misunderstanding? 

The Tuohys haven’t publicly responded to these allegations, and when they do, they may have a very different explanation. But for now, one thing is certainly clear: The adoption story may not be true.

So, what does this all mean?

Tons! The Blind Side made over $300 million, man! Oher is saying he never saw a dime from the movie. The petition alleges that the Tuohys struck a deal with 20^th Century Fox to pay them $225,000, plus 2.5 percent of “all future ‘Defined Net Proceeds’ ” for the rights to produce a film that is based largely on Oher’s life. According to the petition, all that money would be going to the Tuohys and “their natural-born children.”

Another document cited by the petition appears to show Oher signing away the perpetual exclusive rights to his name, image, and likeness without any compensation whatsoever. Oher’s signature is on the agreement, but he’s claiming to have no recollection of inking the deal—going so far as to float the idea that it might be a forgery.

If Oher is being honest when he says he hasn’t received any payment for his life-story rights, then something has gone terribly wrong.

I’m bummed out now. 

You should be! There is no such thing as kindness. Everyone on earth is out to fuck you. We live in a cynical world.

Is The Blind Side any good?

No.

So, what did we learn today, Luke?

Oh, I don’t know—that you should never take feel-good chaff at face value? Obviously, the details of this story are still being ironed out, and nothing is certain yet, but it highlights how we should always be leery of white people who seem a little eager to demonstrate how good they are toward people of color. Maybe the real takeaway is that everything—even movies—can be Milkshake Ducked at the drop of a hat. Nowhere is safe. Next, we’re going to learn that Bong Joon-Ho actually has a family locked up in his basement.