The Colorado Springs-based United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee fired a high-ranking employee there in May because he blew the whistle on the organization’s failure to protect a 15-year-old paralympic athlete from sexual abuse and raising other issues, a lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges.

The lawsuit, filed in Denver District Court, alleges the USOPC retaliated against Dr. William Moreau, its former vice president of sports medicine, for pushing for reforms in the wake of the sex abuse scandal involving Dr. Larry Nassar, sentenced to 40 to 175 years for molesting elite female gymnasts while purportedly treating them for sports injuries.

The alleged incident involving the paralympic athlete is one of several clashes Moreau had with the USOPC detailed in the complaint. It alleges the USOPC is not protecting the medical records of athletes from snooping USOPC employees and also is not doing enough to ensure the well-being of suicidal athletes and others struggling with mental problems.

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The organization also did not heed Moreau’s warnings that it should fire a strength and conditioning coach who appeared naked in a public sauna area in a building being visited by underage gymnasts, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit states that Moreau met resistance and his ultimate termination after he alerted the organization it was not following the law and its own policy for failing to promptly report the 2018 statutory rape of the 15-year-old.

Luella Chavez D’Angelo, USOPC’s chief marketing and communications officer, said the organization is still reviewing the complaint and could not speak about specific issues the lawsuit alleges.

“We regret that Dr. Moreau and his attorney have misrepresented the causes of his separation from the USOPC,” she said in a prepared statement. “We will honor their decision to see this matter through in the courts, and we won’t comment on the specifics as we go forward.”

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Moreau, a board-licensed chiropractor, is now the chief medical officer at the University of Western States in Portland, Ore. He told The Gazette he was forced to relocate after the firing and that his family remains in Colorado, where his 94-year-old mother lives.

“My wife tries to go back and forth,” Moreau said. “She looks after my mom. She tries to keep it all together.”

The lawsuit states he was fired ostensibly for being a licensed chiropractor and not a licensed medical doctor, but the person who replaced him was also a licensed chiropractor. The position nine months later was refilled by a licensed doctor, the suit claims.

“I take this business pretty seriously and after the Larry Nassar story broke, it was clear that we needed to reform, but it just wasn’t happening,” Moreau told The Gazette. “I decided as a vice president, I needed to do my fiduciary duty to protect the organization and more importantly to warn the athletes. I felt they were breaking the law and they needed to quit and start doing the right thing. Not only was I not listened to, eventually they got sick of me telling them they weren’t following the law, and they fired me.”

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Moreau worked for the USOPC for a decade and during that time he consistently received stellar reviews, as scored by five different managers, the lawsuit states. It also said the year before his firing he received a merit-based salary increase due to outstanding performance. He was never reprimanded or given any formal disciplinary write-up, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit claims the Ropes & Gray law firm’s 252-page investigative report detailing Nassar’s sexual abuse, released in December 2018, singled out Moreau for trying to intervene and protect athletes from Nassar’s sexual predation.

Moreau warned Nassar about treating gymnasts outside of the central USOPC medical area, the investigative report found. He also told him he shouldn’t treat athletes alone, and that he should treat the gymnasts next to other athletes, according to the Ropes & Gray report.

“Dr. Moreau’s courageous candor in the in-depth investigation of the tragic Nassar scandal was honest and consonant with public policy and the law demanding truthful reporting under the circumstances,” the lawsuit alleges. “His contributions were material in uncovering the truths underlying that scandal.”

In the 2018 incident involving the 15-year-old paralympic athlete, the athlete was staying alone in a hotel room in Des Moines, Iowa, during a USOPC competition, when she should have been supervised, the lawsuit states.

She had sex with a 20-year-old and afterward said she was so ashamed that she was going to kill herself, according to the lawsuit. USOPC officials did not immediately alert her parents or police of the statutory rape and only did so after Moreau said they had an obligation to do so, according to the lawsuit.

Moreau’s lawyer, Darold Killmer of Denver, said the lawsuit shows that the USOPC still has not turned the corner on protecting athletes despite widespread criticism following the Nassar sexual assault scandal.

Killmer said Moreau was treated harshly by the USOPC after raising valid issues of athlete safety and well-being.

“The more they would meet his concerns with indifference, the more urgent he became,” Killmer said. “They finally felt they had to shut him up by firing him, which obviously is counterproductive. The public needs to know the arrogance and indifference the USOPC has shown on these things.”

The lawsuit states that the USOPC was indifferent when Moreau documented “300 intrusions” into athlete-patient files by employees working for the USOPC.

It also alleges Moreau tried to push the USOPC to pursue emergency mental health care for an Olympic bicyclist who had attempted suicide. Instead, Moreau’s warnings were brushed aside and the athlete went on to commit suicide, according to the lawsuit. Five weeks after that death, Moreau was fired.

The lawsuit alleges that when Moreau warned during one meeting in 2019 that the USOPC needed to develop mental health care planning for suicidal athletes, he was shocked to hear a USOPC clinical sports psychologist say, “People who want to kill themselves, will kill themselves.”

The USOPC has been heavily criticized for the Nassar scandal. Legislation is pending in Congress to establish a committee, with athlete participation, to investigate and recommend changes to the USOPC.

Women who say they were sexually abused by Nassar have sued the USOPC. Swimmers, taekwondo competitors and athletes in other areas also have sued the USOPC, arguing that the organization failed to react despite abundant evidence young athletes were vulnerable to sexual abuse.

The USOPC in November unveiled reforms aimed at addressing some of the criticism. It said at that time that it would increase athlete representation on its governing board. In 2017, the U.S. Center for SafeSport, a Denver-based nonprofit, also opened. The center is charged with investigating allegations of sexual abuse, though it has been criticized for being understaffed and underfunded.

Moreau said the USOPC is only going through the motions and doing minimal reforms when a top-to-bottom culture change is needed. He said he drafted more far-reaching recommendations but executives at the USOPC would not meet with him to discuss his suggested reforms.

He said the USOPC failed to act when he told them they weren’t following Colorado’s mandatory reporting laws requiring notification to police and social services of allegations of sexual and physical abuse of minors.

He told The Gazette that he asked the USOPC to dedicate $100,000 to bolster mental health treatment for athletes and was told he should raise the money himself. The organization went on to spend more than $100,000 on furniture and redecorating, he said.

“They give a lot of rhetoric and no action,” Moreau said. “Well, they did take one action: They got rid of the squeaky wheel.”

Killmer said Moreau’s allegations show the USOPC still has a culture that is hostile to protecting athletes.

“What they wanted to do is pull the wool over the eyes of the public like they’ve cleaned house and all is ship shape,” Killmer said. “But in the year of 2019, while they’re saying everything is good to go, that’s when Dr. Moreau got fired.”