The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘The Blind Side’ Made Him Famous. But He Has a Different Story to Tell.

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

It was an overcast Monday afternoon in late April, and Michael Oher, the former football player whose high school years were dramatized in the movie “The Blind Side,” was driving Michael Sokolove on a tour through a forlorn-looking stretch of Memphis and past some of the landmarks of his childhood.In the movie, Oher moves into the home of the wealthy white couple Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy. They take him shopping for clothes, help him obtain a driver’s license, buy him a pickup truck and arrange for tutoring that helps improve his grades and makes him eligible to play college football. In real life, Oher went on to play eight seasons as a starting offensive tackle in the N.F.L. and won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens.Now, Oher is suing the Tuohys, claiming that they have exploited him by using his name, image and likeness to promote speaking engagements that have earned them roughly $8 million over the last two decades — and by repeatedly saying that they adopted him when they never did. Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

I'm Michael Sokolove. I'm an author and I've been a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine for more than two decades. So in 2009, this film comes out and it's based on a book by Michael Lewis, the same guy who wrote The Big Short and Moneyball. The film is called The Blind Side. It tells the real-life story of a black teenager named Michael Orr, who grew up poor and shuttling between couches without a regular home, and how he was taken in by this very wealthy white family during his high school football career in Memphis.

This family, Sean and Leanne Toohey, do all kinds of things for Michael. They give him a new truck and new clothes, and they get him tutoring to raise his grades and make him eligible to play college football. The Tooheys call him their adopted son. Michael goes on to become a football star at the University of Mississippi, and then he has an eight-year career in the NFL. It's really this kind of American fairy tale. The movie was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and it became one of the most beloved sports movies of all time. It touched people on an emotional level. But as we all know, it's common for movies to embellish real life.

And that was the case for The Blind Side, which was told almost exclusively through the perspective of the Tooies and their account of their own charity and good works. And much less from Michael Ohr's point of view, his character in the film is virtually silent. But now a more realistic version of the blindside story has emerged. One of ruptured relationships, squabbles over money, and a family come asunder. Last year Michael Orr filed a lawsuit against the Tooies. and a family come asunder. Last year, Michael Orr filed a lawsuit against the Tooheys. On the surface, this dispute is about how Sean and Leanne profited off Michael's story.

In the years since the release of The Blind Side, Sean and Leanne have made about $8 million speaking about what they did for Michael. Michael also contends that the Toohees did not fairly compensate him for the film. He had to share his proceeds, split equally five ways between the Toohees and their biological children. But at the root of this falling out is something deeper than money. Even though the Tooies had called Michael their adopted son, they never legally adopted him.

Rather, they had entered him into a conservatorship. The movie, Michael says, has followed him like an unwelcome shadow. People think they know his story, but it's not actually his story. It's someone else's point of view, of his life. Michael told me that the movie felt like a comedy about someone else, not him at all. What upsets Michael is the narrative promoted by the movie, that he's not a smart person, that he has some kind of intellectual disability, and would have failed miserably without the help of the Tooies.

He told me that he felt robbed, not so much of money but of his identity and his own agency and proper credit for what he achieved. He had been homeless to the point that he scavenged for food when he was seven and eight years old. He was very poor, but also very resourceful. And by the time he was a teenager, he was already a promising athlete. And then the Tooies came along. And that's where the fairy tale begins. And part of that fairy tale is that they were the only ones who could save him.

I chose to report this story because I simply sought to answer what happened here. How did these people come to such odds with each other when the movie portrays this very loving family? And there was another thing that I very much wanted to do. I wanted to give Michael a voice. So here's my article, read by Ron Butler. Our producer is Jack DiSidoro, and the music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito.

performed by Aaron Esposito. That's where Heard Village was. Michael Orr was pointing to the site of a now demolished housing project where he lived with his mother, who was addicted to drugs, and at various times as many as seven of his 11 siblings. It was an overcast Monday afternoon in late April, and Orr, the former football player whose high school years were dramatized in the movie The Blind Side, was driving me on a tour through a forlorn-looking stretch of Memphis and past some of the landmarks of his childhood. And right over there, that was a store called Chisholm Trail. It's one of the places I'd steal from. Real food, not candy. Pizza, hot dogs, baloney. One time I took a ham."

Orr played eight seasons as a starting offensive tackle in the NFL and won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens. He is now 38 and his neatly trimmed beard has a few flecks of gray. He is 6'5 and says he is under his playing weight of 315 pounds. We were in his GMC Denali pickup, a big truck to accommodate his big frame. Here's where the sisters lived, he said as we turned a corner, gesturing toward a rambling house with a picnic table out front. This was the home for nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, an order founded by Mother Teresa. We'd go there and they would feed us.

I'll never forget it, because it's the first time I had lemon meringue pie. We drove from what is known as Uptown Memphis to the more prosperous East Side and to a place that Orr pointed to with pride. A spot along a six lane highway where, beginning when he was seven, he sold Sunday newspapers. You couldn't be lazy and just sit on the crate like some of the other kids would do, he told me. You had to walk around.

You had to get up and wave the paper. I sold the most newspapers out of anyone. Our last stop was a stately yellow home framed by two tall oaks. He pulled halfway up the driveway. This is where I lived with my family, Orr said. He turned to me and to make sure I got the joke, added, you know what I mean, right? My family.

This was where Leanne and Sean Tuohy lived with their two children and for about a year with Orr. The Tuohys took him shopping for clothes, helped him get a driver's license, bought him a pickup truck, and arranged for tutoring that boosted his grades and made him eligible to play college football. The charity they extended, a wealthy white couple taking in a formerly homeless black teenager, is the basis of The Blind Side. Based on Michael Lewis' 2006 non nonfiction book of the same name,

the movie came out in the fall of 2009, less than a year into Barack Obama's first term as president, and audiences largely embraced it as a parable of hope and racial harmony. Orr is now suing the Tooheys. Last August, in the probate court of Shelby County, Tennessee, Orr's lawyers filed a suit claiming that the Tuies have exploited him by using his name, image, and likeness to promote speaking engagements that have earned them roughly $8 million over the last two decades, and by repeatedly saying that they had adopted him

when they never did. The Tuies have claimed in response that Orr in recent years has attempted to extort them with menacing texts. The lawsuit shocked many who saw the movie and led to a deluge of worldwide media coverage, with news stories often referring to Orr and the Tooies as the blindside family. We're devastated, Sean Tooie told a reporter from the Daily Memphian on the day the suit was filed. It's upsetting to think we would make money off any of our children, but we're going to love Michael at 37 just like we love to mid-16. The Tooheys have not spoken publicly since then, and they declined to talk to me for this article.

I visited Orr twice during the spring, first in Nashville, where he lives with his wife Tiffany and their five children, and then in Memphis. These were the first times he had talked publicly since filing suit against the Tooys. He was, at all times, resolute. He believes he was wronged both by the couple who took him in and by a movie that made him into a cartoon image he doesn't recognize. But he was also self aware enough to know that many people would not take his side. In our conversations, he sometimes seemed to check himself.

There I go, pouting again, right? He said at one point, as he recounted his grievances against the Tooheys. I know that's what some people are going to think, he's being ungrateful. The couple's lawyers argued that the Tooheies have a right to tell the story of their family and that Orr is part of that story. Orr's lawyers counter that without Orr, the Tuies would never have had a profitable story to tell. The case is moving slowly.

The Tuies have filed for a partial summary judgment, a routine motion to have some of the claims in the case dismissed. A hearing on that has been scheduled for October 1st. If the case reaches trial, it probably will not do so until next year. Even then, the outcome of the legal proceedings may not provide a clear picture of the relationships among the people involved. It might even be that the positions taken by each side, one claiming to have been exploited, the other extorted, are both true.

That would make this chapter of The Blind Side, its epilogue, less a fairy tale of racial reconciliation, and more a classic American story of money, misunderstanding, and ruptured relationships. Leanne and Sean Tuohy met at the University of Mississippi, known as Ole Miss, where he was a star basketball player and she was a cheerleader. They became modern Memphis royalty, founding members of their evangelical church, owners of a private jet they called Air Taco.

Sean made a fortune from his ownership of more than 100 fast food franchises, mainly Taco Bells, KFCs, and Long John Silver's. He sold most of them in 2019 for $213 million. The couple sent their children to the private school Leanne attended, Briar Crest Christian, founded in 1973. The same year Memphis implemented a court ordered busing plan to desegregate its public schools. Their daughter, Collins, would marry the scion of another prominent Memphis

family, Cannon Smith, the son of the billionaire FedEx founder, Fred Smith. Or came from another world entirely. While moving between foster homes, his mother's house and a Salvation Army shelter, and sometimes the streets, he missed long stretches of his school years and his academic record suffered. But he was a promising athlete. He was not just large, he was also unusually fast and nimble. A youth basketball coach named Tony Henderson succeeded in enrolling him

in Briar Crest before his 10th grade year, along with his own son, Steve, who was a year younger. Or lived with the Hendersons for a time, and then in the home of another black classmate, Quinterio Franklin. At some point during his time at Briar Crest, exactly when has become a point of contention, he moved in with the Tooys. In the movie, the country singer Tim McGraw plays a laconic but canny Sean Tooy.

Sandra Bullock won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Leanne as a southern tiger mom who makes Or her cause. In one scene, she storms out of a lunch with her friends when one of them presses her on why she thinks it's safe to have Orr living in the house with her teenage daughter. In another, a local gang leader who has a beef with Orr says to her, tell him to sleep with one eye open. You hear me, bitch? She responds, no, you hear me, bitch.

You threaten my son, you threaten me. She lets him know she's in a prayer group with a district attorney and is a member of the NRA. And I'm always packing. The Michael Orr of the movie, played by a lesser known actor, Quentin Aron, is passive and hardly speaks. He displays none of the grit of a child who survived for many years on his own and seems to have no friends.

Not even among his high school football teammates. This version of Orr is helpless and alone until the Tooies get involved. Orr did not even want to see the movie, which came out when he was just months into his NFL career. He already felt that Lewis's book, published three years earlier, had cost him a higher draft position and the increased money that goes with, by creating the impression that he was stupid. The NFL people were wondering if I could read a playbook, he told me. A month or so after the movie's premiere, the Ravens team chaplain persuaded Orr to see it with him and two teammates at a theater in Baltimore. It's hard to describe my reaction, he told me.

It seemed kind of funny to me, to tell you the truth. Like it was a comedy about someone else. It didn't register. But social media was just starting to grow, and I started seeing stuff that I'm dumb, I'm stupid. Every article about me mentioned the blind side, like it was part of my name. He worries now that the movie will have a negative impact on his children. If my kids can't do something in class, will their teacher think,

their dad is dumb? Is that why they're not getting it? The blind side earned more than $300 million at the box office, and it brought widespread fame to the Tooies. In 2014, they were interviewed at Baylor University by its then-president, Kenneth Starr. Earlier guests at his on-campus speakers series included Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State, and Sandra Day O'Connor, the Supreme Court Justice. Later, the Tuies appeared on an episode of the reality TV series, Below Deck.

The crew of a luxury yacht staged a tailgate themed party for them on a Caribbean beach. The limelight mainly focused on Leanne, an interior decorator who began giving speeches for as much as $50,000 per engagement. She delivered a keynote address in 2018 at a United Way event in North Carolina, where previous year's speakers included Soledad O'Brien and Maya Angelou. She continued to give speeches in 2023. An event scheduled for last November promoted her as the adoptive mother of

NFL football star Michael Oar. This has been their consistent characterization of the relationship with Orr. In public appearances, and in their 2010 book, In a Heartbeat, Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving, the Tewies have referred to him as their son and themselves as his adoptive parents, but they never adopted him. Instead, when he was 18, Sean and Leigh Ann petitioned to establish a conservatorship that gave them control over his finances and major life decisions. The legal measure was approved by a judge, despite the two is acknowledging at the time

that Orr had no known physical or psychological disabilities, which Tennessee state law requires be present for a conservatorship to be granted. It remained in force for two decades, through the end of his NFL career, though it is not clear how the Tewys exercised the power it gave them. Orr's lawyers claimed that the conservatorship gave the Tewys a responsibility to look after his interests

and put them above their own, and instead, they profited off him. Orr's lawsuit included a request to end the conservatorship, and the probate court judge, Kathleen Gomes, quickly dissolved it. The Tooheys did not oppose the request. She opened the hearing by saying that she had been a lawyer for decades, mostly practicing in the area of probate and conservatorship, and a judge for 10 years.

And in all my 43 years, I have never, ever seen a conservatorship being opened for someone who was not disabled, she said from the bench. What will be litigated, assuming the case goes forward, is Orr's demand for unspecified monetary damages for the Tuohy's alleged misuse of his name, image, and likeness in promoting their public appearances. The tangle and emotional complexities, even contradictions, at play among Orr and the Tooey's are evident in the fact that even today, Orr fondly recalls his time

with the Tooey's. Honestly, it was great. I had a bed to stay on. I was eating good. They got me a truck. In his own book, published in 2011, entitled I Beat the Odds, From Homelessness to the Blind Side and Beyond, or includes this dedication. To the Toohey family, you are truly a blessing to me.

Thank you for helping me to turn my dreams into reality. Later in the book, he writes, the more time I spent with that family, the more time I felt like I had found a home. In the Tooey's book, after recounting how they learned that Orr would be named the number one football recruit in the nation in the spring of his junior year, they write, suddenly, it seemed we had the most sought after football player in the country living in an upstairs bedroom. They continued, but the biggest event for

all of us that spring was our adoption of Michael. Orr says he did not move in with the Toohees until that summer. It may seem like a small discrepancy, but his timing would not place him in the Toohees home until he was already one of the most coveted college football recruits in the county. In our conversations, Or referred several times to the Toohey's narrative and said that he had gone along with it for many years because telling a different story, and one at odds with the hit movie, seemed like more than he was capable of while he was devoting himself to the hard work of playing pro football.

Lee Antwoe, in an affidavit, has said that the use of the word adopted was always meant in its colloquial sense, to describe the family relationship we felt with Mr. Orr. It was never meant as a legal term of art. In Tennessee, and in 27 other states, and Washington, D. DC, it's illegal to adopt an adult. It sometimes happens for estate planning purposes, or so one of the parties can play a role in making decisions about medical care and other issues. Orr was 18, legally an adult, when the conservatorship was established in December of his senior year of high school.

Adoption doesn't have a colloquial meaning, and it's not a word you throw around lightly, one of Orr's lawyers, Anne Johnson, told me. As an 18-year-old, he was told that he was made a part of the family. He believed that, but it wasn't true. Even before the movie and the invitations to give paid speeches, the Tooies seemed to derive at least one benefit from welcoming Orr into their home. He chose to play football at Ole Miss, where they were major donors to the athletic program,

or boosters in the Argo of the National Collegiate Athletics Association. Since 2014, the practice facility for the men's and women's basketball teams has been known as the Tuohy Basketball Center. The couple have never denied that they hoped Orr would play football at Ole Miss, but they have insisted that he made the choice on his own. In their telling, the conservatorship was a way to demonstrate to the NCAA

that they did not exert influence over a non-family member by showering him with gifts. If the NCAA, which sets eligibility rules for college sports, had concluded that was the case, it most likely would not have allowed Orr to play at Ole Miss. But after its investigation, it essentially decided to consider Orr as a member of the Toohey family. When I asked Orr about his school choice, he told me that it was kind of like osmosis.

It became where I was going to go, but I want to be clear that I don't regret it. One of Orr's fondest childhood memories is the several weeks he spent in a psychiatric unit at St. Joseph's Hospital in Memphis. He had become a ward of the state after child welfare authorities determined that his mother could not care for him. He was committed to the hospital as a 10 or 11 year old, after he kept running away from foster homes and back to his mother. That was the best time of my or 11 year old, after he kept running away from foster homes and back to his mother. That was the best time of my life up until then, he says.

I was eating three meals a day, I had my own room, a TV and a VCR, and I was watching all kinds of movies. He kept running away even after he got out, and at some point, or figured, the authorities stopped looking for him. He was in and out of school and spent his happiest hours playing basketball in church gyms and football in a nearby park. You would see Michael and then you wouldn't, Craig Vale, Orr's closest childhood friend from Hurt Village told me.

If he wasn't around, I just figured he moved away. And then he'd come back and we'd pick up on where we were and play together. Or steered clear of serious trouble. If Michael didn't like it, he wasn't following along, Vale says. Quinterio Franklin, who played on the football and basketball teams at Briar Crest, lived on a country road across the state line in Mississippi. When Michael came to Briar Crest, I was like, cool, another black guy,

Franklin told me. It was natural that we got close because there weren't many of us. He was a jokester, a people person, a lively personality. When I spoke to Franklin's stepfather, Anthony Burrow, about Orr's time in their household, he told me, from my grandmom on up, we have always taken people into the family. Mike was a great kid, and he had spent the night once or twice with us. When Terrio asked me about him staying with us full time, I called my sister,

and she said, it is a privilege when someone asks that of you. So he came over and made himself at home. We had four wheelers and he became an avid four wheeler. Everyone got to know him. He and Terrio were like two peas in a pod. Orr lived with their family full time for roughly a year. It was the last place he lived before moving in with the Tooys. He somehow persuaded another black kid on the Briar Crest basketball team,

Quinterio Franklin, to let him use his house as a kind of base camp, Lewis writes. Leanne drove Orr there one night after a track meet, the book continues. It was a trailer, she says, squalid quarters Orr needed to be rescued from. That's it, she then tells Orr. Get all your crap, you're moving in with me. After he lugs his belongings out in a garbage bag, she orders a cleansing of the clothes.

Until that moment, Lewis writes, Leanne had hoped that what they and other Briar Crest families had done for Michael added up to something like a decent life. Now that she knew it didn't, she took over the management of that life, completely. Or drove me to see where he lived with Theriot's family. The house was at the end of a gravel driveway, off a winding lane called Church of Christ Road.

It was not a trailer, but rather one of the prefabricated houses common in the south known as Jim Walter Homes. They were assembled on site and buyers had to own the land. Burroughs said the house was first owned by his grandparents and that it had four bedrooms. When you're rich and you have certain things, I imagine you have a different way of looking at the world, he said. Maybe it did look like a trailer to Ms. Dewey.

Burrow, who owns a small flooring company, said he understood why Orr left his family. They gave him monetary gifts, took him shopping. He's a kid, a young black man who has had nothing. He's going to run with that. I reached out to Joseph Crone, another high school teammate and now a lawyer. There was common knowledge he was living with Terrio for a long time,

he told me. They always came to school together. Before that, he lived with Steve, whose father, Tony Henderson, first encouraged Orr to enroll in Briar Crest. Right up to the start of summer practice before our senior year, I feel like he was kind of couch surfing. He stayed with me a few times. He stayed with other guys too.

We were all teammates, so there was that level of comfort. We'd be like, hey buddy, come crash at my house. Orr was introduced to the wider world by one of America's foremost nonfiction authors. Michael Lewis's books tend to be about big systems and money. Moneyball, The Big Short, and Going Infinite, for example. And he tells his stories through characters who are iconoclastic, even heroic. They see into the future in ways that others can't.

At about the same time that he was researching the importance of the left tackle position in football, which protects a right-handed quarterback's blind side and the economic resources that NFL teams devote to the position, he discovered that an old friend, Sean Toohey, his classmate at a New Orleans private school from kindergarten through 12th grade, had a potential NFL left tackle living in his house. The Tooheys and Michael Orr became his characters. The book, which was excerpted in the New York Times magazine, set everything into motion, the movie, the fame of its real life characters and the current dispute.

Without it, the Tooheys most likely would be little known outside of Memphis, and Orr would be no more famous than most of the other NFL players who toiled as offensive linemen. It's not uncommon for filmmakers to embellish the real-life stories they find in books, and the Blind Side movie certainly did. But the movie is faithful to the book's tone. Both are told through the Tooies' perspective, with Orr virtually silent. And both movie and book depart from reality in ways that exalt the Tooey's and, in Orr's view, diminish him. In the movie, Orr is the rare American male who knows so

little about football that he must have it explained to him by a child. Ten-year-old Sean Tooey Jr., who moves a ketchup bottle and other condiments and spices around on a kitchen table to show him how players are positioned on the field. The scene is not in the book, but in Lewis's rendering, Orr has no idea how to play when he first takes the field for Briar Crest. When he'd been thrown into games during his junior year, Lewis writes, he had spent most of his time wandering around the field in search of someone to

fall over. But this was the same season, his junior year, that Orr was named to the All Metro team by the Commercial Appeal, the primary daily newspaper in Memphis. He keeps an image of the newspaper story in his cell phone. It's more than a memento. It's proof to him that he amounted to something and was recognized for it before the Tooheys intervened in his life. It was after that season that he was identified as one of the top college

football recruits in the nation. Orr was a teenager finishing up high school and then a freshman at Ole Miss when Lewis was doing his research. Orr told me that he did not understand at the time why someone was interested in his story or how he would fit into the book. I talked to him a little, he said of Lewis when I asked about his involvement. Passages of the book now read as off key. In characterizing Orr's otherness at the wealthy and

almost all white Briar Crest school, Lewis describes him variously as this huge black kid and as lost as a Martian stumbling out of a crash landing. His mother, Denise Orr, is very large and very black. And in a brief meeting with her son, Michael and Leanne, she slurs her words and wears a muumuu and a garish wig. Sean Toohey, who pitched in as an assistant football coach at Briar Crest, is credited by Lewis with a magical ability to instill confidence in teenage boys.

He was said to reach out especially to the school's few black athletes. I married a man who doesn't know his own color, he quotes Leanne as saying. After Orr learns that his father is dead, apparently having been thrown off a highway overpass, Leanne tells him it might be for the best. You didn't know the man, she says in Lewis's book, and, one way or another, you are going to have money, and you know that he would have found you and made claims upon you. In April, I met Lewis at a hotel restaurant in Washington, DC. When I asked him what he believes caused the relationships to

fracture among the people depicted in The Blind Side, he responded by talking about the economics of his book. Let me give you the data points, he said. The book did poorly, it never found its market. Football people don't really read books compared to baseball people. And if they're going to read one, they don't want a chick flick in the middle of it. Hollywood, Lewis said, did not initially have strong interest in the book. But the film ultimately was produced by Alcon Entertainment, Hollywood, Lewis said, did not initially have strong interest in the book.

But the film ultimately was produced by Alcon Entertainment, whose controlling shareholder and chairman of the board is Fred Smith, the FedEx founder and now the father-in-law of the Toohey's daughter. Or contends that he did not benefit fairly from the movie. Sean and Leanne Toohey, in a response filed in the Tennessee court, state that the movie money was split five ways, with equal shares also going to the couple and their two biological children, the deal they say or verbally agreed to.

He did not have his own lawyer representing him. The movie money was supposed to be paid directly to the Tooheys, then be distributed to the others. Sean and Leanne Tooey in court documents say that Orr's one-fifth share has come to just over $138,000. You know they did not steal his movie money, right? Lewis said to me, this whole thing starts with that. It starts with a lie.

I would just be very suspicious about everything else. Louis focused on the material benefits Orr got from the tuis. Did you get a sense of how much money they spent on him when he was living with them? They bought him a truck. They bought him clothes. They housed him. He continued, there's not a whiff of possibility the tuis are going to milk money off Michael Orr.

You've got to sort of know more about them. They're rich and generous. They aren't stingy rich people. They're open handed rich people. When I brought up aspects of his book that I believed were inaccurate, among them that Orr barely knew how to play football when he first came to live with the Tooies. Lewis said that he was confident that the people who witnessed Orr's story in

real time had provided him with an accurate account. I told him I had seen Terry O'Franklin's house and that I did not think its description as a trailer that served as Orr's temporary base camp was correct. You should ask the Tooys about that, he replied. In a profile of Lewis in The Guardian last October, he seemed to attribute Orr's change of behavior, as he put it, to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease that afflicts some football players,

which can only be diagnosed after death through a brain autopsy. This is what happens to football players who get hit in the head, he said. They run into problems with violence and aggression. Lewis told me his inference that Orr had CTE was made in anger, and he regretted it, but he then repeated it. It should be part of the conversation about Michael Orr, he said. Last year, not long before he filed his lawsuit, Orr published a second book, When Your Back's Against the Wall.

In it, he writes that the story people think they know about him makes it look like I was sitting there waiting for a handout, and discounts the years of survival, resisting the streets, making the most of myself. Lewis, however, said he was told that without the tuis, Orr was headed for a life of destitution or crime, even though Orr had no history of anything of the sort. This is what everyone told me, he said. He was on a course that was very bad.

He was going to be a bodyguard for a gang in Hurt Village. It was not always clear to me whether Orr felt betrayed more by the Tooies or by the movie. This is understandable, given the extensive overlaps between the filmmakers and the Tooie family. The movie was based on their friend's book, produced by the company controlled by their daughter's future father-in-law and executive produced by his daughter. The daughter of another family friend, the lawyer who represented them in

the conservatorship, appeared in a small role in the movie. Sean Tewy has seemed to suggest that he had the right to approve the script. I had to give them the rights to use our name, he said, while sitting at dinner with the captain of the yacht in the 2017 Below Deck episode. And I said, I'll give you the rights to use the name if I get to read the script and approve it or unapprove it. Sandra Bullock spent time with Leanne Toohey in order to get to know the character she would be playing. Tim McGraw met Sean on the set.

The first time Quentin Aaron met Orr was in the tunnel leading to the field before Raven's game, after the movie came out. I was told that it might be better that way, Aaron told me. was in the tunnel leading to the field before a Ravens game, after the movie came out. I was told that it might be better that way, Aaron told me. I can't remember if it was the director or one of the producers, but they said he was a young homeless kid in the movie. But that's not who he is now. At the time, he was getting ready for the NFL. Sean and Leanne Toohey attended the 2009 movie premiere in New York and

the Academy Awards in Hollywood the following March. Or went to neither. He told me that he could not recall if he was invited to either event, but would have declined if he had been. Or now feels duped by the Tooheys. He enjoyed the comforts of their home, but while he was off at their alma mater playing football, the couple and their friends and associates took part in a project that is likely to follow him

the rest of his life. The first time I heard I love you, it was Sean and Leanne saying it, he told me. When that happens at 18, you become vulnerable. You let your guard down, and then you get everything stripped from you. It turns into a hurt feeling. He paused for a moment. I don't wanna make this about race, but what I found out was that nobody says I love you more than coaches and white people.

When black people say it, they mean it. The blind side brought attention and pride to the Briar Crest community. But the falling out among its protagonists has caused many to feel caught in the middle. The principal who agreed to enroll Orr declined to comment for this article. Hugh Fries, Briar Crest's coach at the time, took a job on the football staff of Ole Miss before Orr's freshman season, and is now the head coach at Auburn, his fourth college head coaching job. He's on a six year contract that pays him $6.5 million annually.

Michael is dear to our family, he replied by email while declining my request for an interview. Orr has a legal team of four lawyers behind him, including Don Barrett, who is based in Lexington, Mississippi, and he was one of the lead plaintiff's lawyers in the first settlement of the lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Sean and Leanne self-dealed in every way you could imagine, he told me. The two ways are represented by two Tennessee lawyers,

neither of whom would comment for this article. A prominent Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Martin Singer, who has acted as their spokesman, issued a statement after the lawsuit was filed. Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that the outlandish claims made by Michael Orr about the Tooie family are hurtful and absurd, it said. The idea that the Tooies have ever sought to profit off Mr. Orr is not only offensive, it is transparently ridiculous. He characterized the lawsuit as a shakedown effort.

I asked the Tuies, through a representative they are working with, if they would refer me to friends I could contact who might tell their side of the story. They declined. They also declined to answer written questions or participate in the fact checking of this article. Andrew Kosove, the co-chief executive with Broderick Johnson of Alcon Entertainment, told me that he was saddened by the dispute and

did not understand why Orr believes he was owed more money from the movie. No one did anything dishonest, he says. Leanne and Shawn love Michael. That is the tragedy of this story. There is pain to go around. My prayer and Broderick's prayer is that ultimately there will be a reconciliation, because I believe these are people who love each other. The careers of professional athletes typically do not last beyond their 30s, at which point many of them struggle to grasp who they are without their sport.

I got the sense that for Orr, whose whole life has been a battle against long odds, that feeling was amplified. After he left the NFL in 2017, he finally had time to look back, and little of what he saw made sense. Most of his siblings, he told me, chose the streets. The success he achieved was quickly accompanied by a bizarre and disorienting kind of fame, one in which everyone knew his story, except that it wasn't actually his story.

When we talked, his tone was usually matter of fact, almost stoic. He did not display emotion, but he sometimes referred to events in the past as having been painful. The release of the movie just as he was starting his NFL career was a big blow. That's my heartbreak right there, he said. It was as soon as I got there, I was defined. He played eight seasons of pro football, a long career by NFL standards. He began with a goal of making the Hall of Fame.

A knee injury, a concussion, and chronic migraines led to his leaving the league. He said that drugs prescribed for his headaches caused him to gain 100 pounds, and that he spent a couple of years only periodically venturing out of his house, and sometimes not even leaving his bedroom. In 2017, he was charged with a misdemeanor assault after a physical altercation with an Uber driver. The charge was later dismissed, but the incident, and

the fact that it made the news, filled him with shame. Or described to me another moment, two years later. He was on a flight to a medical appointment, could not fasten his seat belt, and feared he might be removed from the plane. I'm like, man, I'm going to be in the news. Michael Or kicked off a plane for being too fat. A flight attendant brought him a seat belt extender. He changed his diet, went back to the gym, and, as he put it,

restored himself to not my playing shape, but normal person shape. He said that he believed his separation from football would have gone more smoothly if he had been healthy when he left the game. I suggested that maybe after the life he had led, moving from home to home, stealing food to survive, fighting his way up through Briar Crest and into the NFL, he just found himself mentally exhausted when all the striving stopped. You hit it on the head, he said. That's a big component of it. He earned $34 million from the three teams he played for,

according to the website Over the Cap, which tracks NFL salaries. I worked hard for that moment when I was done playing, and saved my money so I could enjoy the time," he said after I mentioned that many people would believe he had filed the lawsuit because he needed money. I've got millions of dollars. I'm fine. In a response filed in court, Sean and Leanne Toohey claimed that Orr had become increasingly estranged from them and began demanding money. He referred to the Toohey's as thieves in one of the texts that the couple's lawyers included in court filings.

If something isn't resolved this Friday, I'm going to go ahead and tell the world how I was robbed by my supposed to be parents, he wrote in another. In a third text, he said, get with Fred and get my money together, a reference to Fred Smith, the Alcon chairman. I asked Orr about the texts. I was just still trying to figure things out, he said. I didn't think anything of it. He claimed the texts lit a fuse, and

he started receiving checks for the movie for the first time. The two of his lawyers have said Orr had already been receiving royalty checks, a claim he denies. Orr spends his time in part taking his children to their sporting events. And as we drove around Memphis, I could hear the chairs and tent he sets up on the sidelines of their games rattling around in the back of his truck. The Orrs have a foundation that raises money to provide scholarships and

mentors to disadvantaged children in Nashville. He also spends a considerable amount of time at the gym. I feel like there's one more time when I can get in elite shape, he said. When I asked why that was important, he said, I'll feel good. I'll walk around happier. I'll have that confidence it gives you. The lawsuit, it seemed to me, is part of a different kind of rebuilding project. happier. I'll have that confidence it gives you." The lawsuit, it seemed to me, is part of a different kind of

rebuilding project, an effort to make himself emotionally whole. Several times he referred to having been robbed by the Tuies, which I came to understand as having a double meaning, robbed of money, and perhaps even more so, robbed of an identity. But why had it taken him so long to go public and file the lawsuit? Why now? Pro football's a hard job, he said. You have to be locked in 100%. I went along with their narrative because I really had to focus on my NFL career,

not things off the field. Away from the game, his focus turned to what he believed was his fair share of the money generated by the movie and the myth spawned by it. For a long time I was so angry mentally, he said, with what I was going through. I'm still working on it.