It looks like Michael Oher will be released from his conservatorship very soon. In a press conference in Memphis on Wednesday, the lawyers for the Tuohy family addressed the former NFL offensive lineman’s allegations after he filed a legal petition to terminate the conservatorship on Monday. Oher claims that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators when he was 18.
“If that’s what he wants to do is terminate it, we’re glad to do so,” attorney Randall Fishman said in the press conference, per PEOPLE. “As a matter of fact, it is our intent to offer to enter into a consent order as it relates to the conservatorship, and then if they have other issues, we’ll deal with them.”
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Fishman was asked why Oher was not adopted during the initial legal proceedings. “It didn’t make any difference to the Tuohys, he said. “There was one thing to accomplish and that was to make him part of the family so that the NCAA would be satisfied because Sean would have been a booster of the university.”
Oher also claims that he made no money off of the 2009 film The Blind Side and while the Tuohys were paid $225,000 for the film plus 2.5 percent of the film’s proceeds. “Well, each member of the family has received the same amount of money,” attorney Steven Farese said, adding that Oher was included. “So, imagine a pie divided by five, okay? We estimate each person received $100,000 – each person in the family.”
An insider told PEOPLE on Wednesday that the Tuohys have received around $700,000 total in rights, payments and profits, which was intended to be divided between the family members — Sean, Leigh Anne, the two biological children and Oher.
Farese said that the Tuohys and Oher have been estranged for the last 10 years, adding that Oher has allegedly become “more and more vocal and more and more threatening.” Tuohy family attorney Marty Singer recently told TMZ Sports that the Super Bowl champion allegedly tried to shake the family down $15 million.
“Over the years, the Tuohys have given Mr. Oher an equal cut of every penny received from The Blind Side,” Singer said. “Even recently, when Mr. Oher started to threaten them about what he would do unless they paid him an eight-figure windfall, and, as part of that shakedown effort refused to cash the small profit checks from the Tuohys, they still deposited Mr. Oher’s equal share into a trust account they set up for his son.”
