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Touhy/Oher reports seems to touch on a lot of culture war issues. Though it could just be a family feud.
They only became a part of his life when he was 17/18. But I guess they decided to become a forever family then. Photos for the next 6-8 years looks like a happy family. They put him in conservatorship at 18 instead of adopting. It gave them a bunch of legal rights over him. Sounds a little bad since he was an adult but it did make a formal tie. And let’s be honest a normal 18 year old often needs adults in the room. An 18 year old who never had a family life definitely needs it. Sort of gets down to whether they were acting in good faith or using him. I lean on good faith.
The movie I believe portrayed him as a little dumb. His childhood issues probably did limit him. By the time he got to the nfl he scored a 19 on the wonderlich. Which when I’ve looked it up before is like American average IQ and around 100. So not dumb just average.
He apparently wants more money now. The family and the author Michael Lewis seem to indicate that they never made much in the movie. Like $700k between all of them. While Oher indicates they got bank. Lewis says this just means Hollywood bad and writers aren’t getting paid. Fwiw Oher never got paid a lot in the nfl. As a first round pick he got 5 years 13.8. For nfl contracts I’d do a simple formula of guessing you get about half after taxes and agent fees. The big money in the nfl is from free agency contracts. He signed two. First one he didn’t finish but was $5/year and played one year. Then signed elsewhere at $3. He played well so they extended him immediately but he got hurt mid year and cut with 9.5 guaranteed. Lifetime earnings probably around $30-35. 15 after taxes and fees. If your life story become a movie that grossed $300 million I think it would be reasonable to think it could boost those earnings and would be meaningful.
The white savior storyline. I’m curious how much current politics could have soured what was a happy relationship. The family no doubt used him some and loved the having a football star in the family thing and doing things like getting draft picks taken together. From my own background I saw the same storyline as my football coach adopted a black kid who was a great athlete (I played midgets football with him and high school basketball). Would have been a Catholic version of the same story. Curious if current politics are ruining these types of relationships.
Slightly different topic but I tend to think the people who make it to play pro sports are significantly above group level IQ. Like Oher being 100 IQ. I just can’t see a 70-80 IQ functioning well enough to understand pro-sports concepts or being capable of training themselves to get there.
Just for some clarification: The media reports seem to be acting like this is a lawsuit, or at least that's the impression they're giving most readers. It's not; it's a petition to terminate the conservatorship and order an accounting from the conservators. There's some language in it about him possibly being screwed out of some money, but without an accounting we don't know. I'm about the same age as Oher and God knows if I found out I had inadvertently made someone my conservator when I was 18 and they accepted money on my behalf I'd be damn sure that they account for every dime.
That being said, the whole thing stinks. Conservatives (i.e. the Fox News comment section) seem to be sure that this is a shakedown from a guy who blew all his NFL money, but there's no evidence of that. I find it highly unlikely as well, because the revelation of the conservatiorship was part of an investigation into his financial affairs he hired an attorney to conduct around the time he retired in 2016; hiring an attorney to investigate one's financial affairs isn't normally something a spendthrift would do, at least not until he he burned through it all. Anyway, the giveaway that he didn't know about the nature of the conservatorship and that the Touheys didn't want him to know the full ramifications of what happened is that they apparently stopped using it when he went to the NFL. Had he known about it at the time he wouldn't have been able to get his own agent and would have either petitioned to end it then or worked with the conservator. If the Touheys had sought to enforce it, it would have been a dead giveaway of what they did and would have caused some controversy right around the time the movie was released. Signing a movie deal on someone's behalf behind their back is one thing, but the public nature of NFL contracts means that this wasn't something that would have gone unnoticed. And there's no evidence that they tried to handle his affairs for him since. Better to let sleeping dogs lie and hope it never comes up again.
Oher stated in his 2011 book that he entered into the conservatorship as a substitute for adoption. While the book was probably ghostwritten, he presumably read it, and would have been aware of it at that time. It's possible he didn't know that it hadn't been legally wrapped up.
What strikes me as most likely is that the family wanted to take care of him, but not to adopt him, because adoption presumably includes family inheritance on equal footing with the other kids. That's...a lot for a rich family to do, emotionally. That's not just the parents decision, at some level, it's also asking your kids to share their inheritance with the new adult son.
I'm glad you brought this up because I forgot to, and it's my suspicion that this was the real reason they got a conservatorship instead of an adoption. My problem is that, when it comes to adults, the two things aren't comparable the way they are for minors. I dealt with one adult adoption when I had my own practice (they were friends I referred out; I didn't handle it myself). The wife had met the husband when the daughter was very young, and the wife was dodging an abusive boyfriend at the time. The husband raised the daughter like she was his own, and would have adopted her earlier, but that would have involved tracking down the bio father to terminate rights which would have created a whole hornet's nest. The couple was working class and relatively young so they weren't likely to have wills or really do any kind of estate planning. The adoption was largely symbolic, but it had the added benefit of making sure that she would inherit and be able to make decisions without a ton of estate planning on his part. I assumed at the time that that's what most adult adoptions were about.
Now compare that to a conservatorship or guardianship of an adult (different states use different terms). It gives the guardian complete control over one's affairs until the court terminates it. In Pennsylvania the court will appoint counsel for the proposed ward just to make sure that the guardianship is in his best interest. It's not something that's done unless someone has the kind of disability that makes it unwise to allow them to handle money or make important decisions. My sister-in-law has a mildly retarded sister who doesn't have a guardian. The process is so involved one of the reasons I pushed Powers of Attorney on practically everyone who came through my office was that it's a lot easier to appoint someone while you're of sound mind then have the court figure out who the best person would be. I'm honestly surprised the court went along with it in the first place. It's certainly not something done symbolically.
My impression is that they didn't want to do the adoption but told him that the conservatorship, since it's an analog of guardianship, is "like an adoption" so they wouldn't have to explain to him that, upon the advice of their attorney, they didn't really want to formally adopt him. It would certainly be an awkward conversation to have. They probably figured that they just wouldn't enforce it. Then Hollywood comes calling while he's away at college and they're authorized to make decisions for him so they make one on behalf of "the family" without explaining anything to him.Then the movie does well and 20 years later the kid finds out that the adoption was a sham and that some contracts were signed on his behalf without his full participation and they involved a lot of money "to most people" and, to top it off, they never filed annual reports with the court even though they're legally required to (though courts often overlook this requirement). So now he wants answers and has to go to court to get them, because at this point he doesn't trust his "parents" to tell him the truth.
We're also all engaging in a little bit of racism/classism in assuming that the white family knew exactly what they were doing at all times, while Oher was just along for the ride. I've known a lot of rich people who got really odd legal ideas in advice from a family lawyer who doesn't really know what he's doing. They might equally have been under the mistaken impression that the conservatorship was kind of like a half-adoption, or that it expired automatically, or any of a dozen other harebrained ideas.
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We have things called wills. You can give money however you please. The Touhys gave equal shares of movie proceeds split 5 ways to both parents, Oher, and kids. Wasn’t a ton of money apparently from what they have.
Who knows why they chose conservatorship. Perhaps, they still wanted his birth parents to have that. For all we know he just royally f$cked himself with this and took himself out of family money. And they would have split three ways because they enjoyed all he brought to the family.
Sure you can distribute your money however you like. But you can't do so without introducing all kinds of problems and intrigue into your family. Just the facts of the matter.
The conservatorship doesn’t eliminate that issue. Someday the will gets read and if you told him you were family he’d still be there. And well that’s a rich persons problem if he gets 10 mill and the biologic kids get 95.
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