Michael Oher Allegations Light Up Social Media
There is nothing the left loves more than a story - true or untrue - about Christians involved in a scandal.
When they can also introduce an element of racism, it’s like hitting a woke home run.
So there was glee and gloating all over social media earlier this week when former NFL offensive lineman Michael Oher accused the white family that took him in when he was an impoverished teenager living on and off with a crack-addicted mother and in and out of foster care, of cheating him out of millions of dollars. Money they made, he claimed, from royalties off of the hit movie, “The Blind Side,” based on the book with the same title by Michael Lewis.
The white savior trope is always gross. And you ever notice how it's the "god-fearing" and "good Christian" people who pull off these pure evil stunts? Michael Oher deserved better than those devils. https://t.co/5LAzuYzAP3
— Joshua Sánchez (@jnsanchez) August 14, 2023
I remember when the Michael Oher story first came out, and I thought there was something horribly fishy about it. Like, the vibe that there were white Christian families out there collecting Black children.
— Claire Potter (@TenuredRadical) August 16, 2023
Let me guess... Michael Oher's conservators are both christian and republican.
— Fight For Freedom (@New_You2015) August 16, 2023
These social media hotheads didn’t wait to hear the other side of the story - hey, it fed an anti-Christian, anti-white narrative - but within days the clearly hurt Sean and Leigh Ann Touhy responded through their attorney. The Touhys claim they shared all of the relatively small royalties equally with the entire family - Oher included - yet recently Oher began threatening to plant negative stories about them in the media if they didn’t give him millions of dollars.
Oher is on a book tour while making these startling accusations. What a happy accident!
When Michael Lewis, a friend of Sean’s since childhood, was approached about turning his book on Mr. Oher and the Tuohys into a movie about their family, his agents negotiated a deal where they received a small advance from the production company and a tiny percentage of net profits. They insisted that any money received be divided equally. And they have made good on that pledge,” said (their attorney) Marty Singer.
Lewis set out to write about the left tackle position in football and how it came to be so important to the game. In researching the book he talked to his friend, Sean Touhy, who’d been a basketball standout at Ole Miss. Touhy and his wife had recently taken in an underprivileged kid from the Memphis inner city and he’d developed into a star college football player. A left tackle who would eventually be drafted by the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL’s first round.
If memory serves, the novel was both a treatise on the left tackle position and the heartwarming story of Michael Oher and his new family.
Nowhere in the book or movie was it alleged that the Touhey’s adopted Oher. They did however, invite him to live with them in their opulent home, provided him with care, love, tutoring and other help to get him eligible to play football.
Oher was swamped with scholarship offers and when he decided to attend Ole Miss the NCAA launched an investigation into the situation in the Touhy home. The wealthy Tuohys owned a chain of Memphis Taco Bells and were prominent Ole Miss boosters.
Michael Lewis told The Washington Post this week that neither he nor the Touhys made millions off the hit movie.
“What I feel really sad about is I watched the whole thing up close,” Lewis said. “They showered him with resources and love. That he’s suspicious of them is breathtaking. The state of mind one has to be in to do that — I feel sad for him.”
In February of 2010 I heard Sean Tuohy speak at Regent University’s Executive Leadership Series. His no-notes talk was riveting as he explained that he knew what it was like to be a talented-but-penniless athlete. His dad had been a New Orleans prep school basketball coach who died while Tuohy was a teen.
Sean had no money for college but attended Ole Miss on an athletic scholarship as Michael Oher would do decades later.
Tuohy told us that he and his family gave permission for their names to be used in the film but they had no input into the making of the movie. The producers made many changes to their story, he said, including puzzling ones, such as changing the ages of the children so his daughter appeared to be younger than Michael Oher. In fact, she and Michael graduated from Briarcrest Christian School at the same time and headed to Ole Miss together.
TMZ reported the Tuohys’ rebuttal of Oher’s allegations:
The Tuohy family says before Michael Oher made “outlandish,” “hurtful” and “absurd” claims about them in court on Monday ... he actually tried to shake them down for $15 MILLION.
Marty Singer -- the Tuohy family attorney -- said it all happened recently ... and, what’s worse, he claimed this is not the first time Oher has done this.
Singer -- in a lengthy statement to TMZ Sports -- said Oher came to the Tuohys prior to filing his 14-page petition in Shelby County, Tenn. ... and threatened them, saying if they didn’t pony up an eight-figure check, he’d “plant a negative story about them in the press.”
One of Oher’s allegations is that the Tuohys tricked him into signing papers granting them conservatorship over him, when he thought they legally adopted him.
No doubt there were paperwork problems with an adoption: Did Oher even have a birth certificate or know the identity of his biological father? Did his biological mother agree to sign away her son? In the book, Lewis wrote that Leigh Ann insisted Michael see his mother regularly. She worried about interfering in his relationship with a woman who loved him but was struggling with drug addiction and poverty. With the NCAA breathing down Oher’s neck, there may have been a need to act swiftly to allow the young man to be eligible to play football.
Singer denied all of the allegations in Oher’s court filing ...explaining that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy absolutely did not trick the former NFL star into getting into a conservatorship when he was 18 years old as he had claimed.
The conservatorship “was established to assist with Mr. Oher’s needs, ranging from getting him health insurance and obtaining a driver’s license to helping with college admissions,” Singer said. “Should Mr. Oher wish to terminate the conservatorship, either now or at anytime in the future, the Tuohys will never oppose it in any way.”
Michael Oher has never made a secret that he believed the portrayal of him in the movie wasn’t flattering enough. That was not the fault of the Tuohys or Michael Lewis. It does seem strange that 14 years after the movie was released Oher decided to make these allegations of fraud against the family that gave him a home and the support to be successful in college.
They claim he recently stopped cashing royalty checks so they began putting the money in a trust fund for his son.
If it’s true that Oher tried to extort money from the family, the ex-NFL player may find himself in the kind of trouble he managed to avoid growing up in one of Memphis’ worst housing projects - Hurt Village - to a single mother with drug problems who couldn’t care for him properly.
Through their attorney, Sean and Leigh Ann Tuohy said they hoped to reconcile with Oher - the teen they fed, housed and treated like a son - soon.
I’d have a hard time forgiving anyone I loved who turned on me in public. For money.
