*An attorney representing the Tuohy family claims that former NFLer Michael Oher attempted a “shakedown” on his “adoptive” parents for $15 million.
The retired athlete, whose life story inspired “The Blind Side,” is suing Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy for profiting off his story and likeness. In court documents filed in Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court, Oher alleges that the Tuohys tricked him into making the couple his conservators.
Marty Singer, the Tuohy’s attorney, called the allegations leveled against his clients in Oher’s petition to end their conservatorship “hurtful and absurd,” TMZ reports.
In a statement issued to PEOPLE, Singer said the Tuohy family “opened their home to Mr. Oher, offered him structure, support, and most of all, unconditional love.”
Singer’s statement continued, “His response was to threaten them, including saying that he would plant a negative story about them in the press unless they paid him $15 million.”
The statement also alleged that “Mr. Oher has actually attempted to run this play several times before,” but was “stopped” after the lawyers representing him “saw the evidence and learned the truth.”
Singer’s statement continued, “Sadly, Mr. Oher has finally found a willing enabler” to file “this ludicrous lawsuit as a cynical attempt to drum up attention in the middle of his latest book tour.”
“Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that the outlandish claims made by Michael Oher about the Tuohy family are hurtful and absurd,” Singer explained. “The idea that the Tuohys have ever sought to profit off Mr. Oher is not only offensive, it is transparently ridiculous.”
Oher’s 14-page petition “alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name,” per ESPN.
“The petition further alleges that the Tuohys used their power as conservators to strike a deal that paid them and their two birth children millions of dollars in royalties from an Oscar-winning film that earned more than $300 million, while Oher got nothing for a story “that would not have existed without him. In the years since, the Tuohys have continued calling Oher, 37, their adopted son and have used that assertion to promote their foundation as well as Leigh Anne Tuohy’s work as an author and motivational speaker,” according to ESPN.
Sean Tuohy told the Daily Memphian that Oher’s allegations have “devastated” the family.
READ MORE: ‘The Blind Side’ Family is ‘Devastated’ About Michael Oher’s Lawsuit
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