Last week, Michael Oher filed a petition to end the conservatorship his alleged adoptive parents imposed on him. According to the document, Oher learned that his parents had tricked him into signing the conservatorship instead of the adoption papers this past February. However, new evidence points out he has been well aware of his situation for years.
In his 2011 memoir I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to The Blind Side, and Beyond, Oher recounts the troubling childhood and adolescence without a family. At one point, he mentions how the Tuohys took him into his life and how he was able to make a name in the NFL.
In this book, he names Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy as his “conservators,” which would prove that he didn’t learn about the conservatorship early this year, but twelve years ago. Fans are divided claiming that probably the Tuohys weren’t lying when they said he was only looking for money and had threatened to make a negative image of them if they didn’t abide by his will. Others say that the book doesn’t change anything since it’s well explained that they indeed tricked him.
In the book, although Oher does say that they were his conservators he also adds that before he turned 18, when he was in high school, they “had already assumed responsibility for me as guardians, which allowed them to sign my school permission slips and take me to medical appointments.” Things changed when he turned 18.
“Since I was already over the age of eighteen and considered an adult by the state of Tennessee, Sean and Leigh Anne would be named as my ‘legal conservators.’ They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as ‘adoptive parents,’ but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account. Honestly, I didn’t care what it was called. I was just happy that no one could argue that we weren’t legally what we already knew was real: We were a family.”
If what he explains in his 2011 book is true, even though he didn’t really know the difference back then, they actually made him sign conservatorship papers instead of adoption. What the petition says is that he learned this year that the Tuohys never adopted him “much to his chagrin and embarrassment.”
There’s still much more to this story since the petition still needs to be processed legally. But if Oher’s story is true, it’s just an example of how conservatorship laws can be used to trick and trap individuals instead of helping them as they should.
