After the recent controversy surrounding her Oscar-winning picture The Blind Side, actress Sandra Bullock has been the target of an internet hate campaign.
Former NFL player Michael Oher launched the internet assaults on Sandra Bullock on Monday, claiming that the Tuohy family had used his tale for financial advantage with the Oscar-winning film The Blind Side, in which Bullock starred. Bullock has come under fire and is being urged to return her Oscar. This comes amid the grief she’s experiencing at losing her longtime boyfriend to Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
As seen in the film The Blind Side, Oher was taken in by the Tuohy family when he attended a private high school in Memphis, Tennessee, where he excelled at football in the early 2000s. The Tuohys decided to help Oher, who had a rough upbringing, through high school. The NFL and Ole Miss were the next stops on his educational journey. Oher’s family, he said in a bombshell lawsuit filed on Monday, duped him into a conservatorship so they could benefit from his name. Oher claims he received no compensation from the film’s massive box office success while the Tuohys made hundreds of thousands.
Oher says he’s learned that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy never officially adopted him, despite what they’ve always maintained and what’s shown in the movies and books. Instead, they had him sign a conservatorship contract while he was a minor, giving them authority over his assets and any transactions made in his name. To collect what is rightfully his, he has filed suit.
Sean Tuohy declared that the allegations had left his family “devastated,” adding that no one had ever benefited financially from using his name.
Tuohy said he consulted attorneys who informed him that he and his wife were too elderly to adopt. A conservatorship was the only option they had.
The Tuohys’ lawyers say Oher sought to blackmail them out of $15 million by threatening to go public with the tale before the case was even filed.
Attorney Marty Singer says that over the years, the Tuohys have paid Mr. Oher an equal split of every dime collected from The Blind Side.
Singer also said that other attorneys had ditched Oher until he “found a willing enabler and filed this stupid action as a cynical effort to drum up publicity amid his current book tour.”
The Touhy lawyer said he couldn’t believe a couple with hundreds of millions of dollars would conspire to withhold profit-sharing payments from anybody, much less from someone they loved as a son.
