A female security official for the National Basketball Association said in a lawsuit Monday that Geno Auriemma, the coach of the United States Olympic women's basketball team, followed, grabbed and tried to forcibly kiss her at a hotel during a basketball tournament in Russia in 2009.

The security officer, Kelley Hardwick, said in the lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, that she pushed him away.

This year, the suit claims, Mr. Auriemma retaliated for her rebuff by successfully demanding that the N.B.A. remove her as the top security official for the United States women's team at the London Olympics. She served as a security official for the women's team at the Olympics in Athens in 2004 and in Beijing in 2008.

In the suit, Ms. Hardwick, 46, a law school graduate and a former New York City undercover narcotics detective, accused Mr. Auriemma, the N.B.A. and USA Basketball, which oversees the women's Olympics team, of employment discrimination.

She provided a list of witnesses, who she said knew about the encounter, to the N.B.A. this year, in an attempt to retain her Olympic assignment, she said. But the league's general counsel did not talk to these people, or to Mr. Auriemma, according to the lawsuit.

"I was willing to close this story in 2009," Ms. Hardwick said in an interview last week. "If Geno had not interfered with my job and my livelihood, I would not have filed this lawsuit."

Strong-willed and self-consciously larger than life, Mr. Auriemma is a legend in women's basketball, serving as the longtime head coach for the University of Connecticut women's team. He coached the Huskies to a record-breaking streak of 89 consecutive wins.

Six of the 12 members of the roster for the Olympic women's team played for the University of Connecticut, the largest number of players from one school. Mr. Auriemma, in an e-mail statement on Monday, said, "I was unaware of this lawsuit until hearing about it in media reports today and therefore will have no comment."

The N.B.A., through a spokesman, Tim Frank, declined to comment on the lawsuit. USA Basketball did not return several calls for comment.

Ms. Hardwick's lawsuit is the latest in a raft of charges involving sexual harassment that have become a legal headache for the N.B.A.

Last December, a veteran security official, Warren Glover, sued the organization, charging that top officials had ignored his complaints that female employees had been sexually harassed and discriminated against. In one instance, Mr. Glover said, a senior N.B.A. official made sexual advances toward a female colleague. When the woman spurned him, the official demeaned her publicly, Mr. Glover said. His suit is continuing.

A year earlier, Bernard Tolbert, the league's former senior vice president for security, left the N.B.A. after settling a sexual harassment lawsuit. And in 2007, the Knicks paid $11.5 million to a former executive, Anucha Browne Sanders, to settle a sexual harassment case against the team and its former coach, Isiah Thomas.

Ms. Hardwick stated in her lawsuit that she was paid less than male colleagues holding a similar title and having less experience, and that she has "slammed" hard against the league's "glass ceiling."

But her lawyer, Randolph McLaughlin, of the firm Newman Ferrara, said that she was reluctant to pursue a legal claim. "If Geno hadn't tried to send a message of control by reaching into her company," he said, "she would not have filed this."

Ms. Hardwick, in an hourlong interview, provided a detailed account of the 2009 incident in Russia, much of which is described in her lawsuit. Rachel Shannon, another N.B.A. security official and a current police officer in a Texas city, also accompanied the women's team on that trip and Ms. Shannon supported most details of Ms. Hardwick's account.

In October 2009, the American basketball team played in an invitational tournament in Yekaterinburg, a Russian city more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow. After dinner, Ms. Hardwick and Ms. Shannon decided to talk in the lobby of the hotel and they saw Mr. Auriemma at the bar with assistant coaches and trainers, the women said.

Ms. Hardwick and Ms. Shannon took their drinks and sat in the lobby.

Mr. Auriemma soon walked over. "He invited himself and started talking about coming from an immigrant Italian background and saying he could relate to inner-city blacks," Ms. Shannon recalled. "We were like 'whatever.'"

A short time later, the two women excused themselves and headed upstairs to their rooms. Mr. Auriemma also walked toward the elevator, and got on with the two women. Ms. Shannon exited first. As Ms. Hardwick exited on another floor and walked to her room, she said, she sensed someone behind her.

"He puts his hand on my left arm and goes to kiss me," Ms. Hardwick said, referring to Mr. Auriemma. "I grabbed his face and mushed him."

She yelled at him, she said: "You better check yourself before you get hurt!"

Mr. Auriemma's face, she said, flushed red, and he retreated down the hall. A few minutes later, Ms. Hardwick called Ms. Shannon.

"Kelley said, 'Can you believe what this guy did?'" Ms. Shannon recalled Ms. Hardwick saying to her. "She wasn't scared; she's a cop like I am. But she was shocked."

Upon returning to New York City, Ms. Hardwick said, she reported these encounters to Mr. Tolbert and to other officials at the N.B.A. Mr. Tolbert told her, she recalled, that she had handled the situation well.

Ms. Hardwick said she had been willing to leave it at that. But on March 22, 2012, she said, she learned that Jim Tooley, the chief executive of USA Basketball, had told the N.B.A. that Mr. Auriemma wanted Ms. Hardwick removed from her Olympic security assignment. That detail emerged in a conference call among N.B.A. security officials, according to Ms. Hardwick. (In 2006, Mr. Tooley sent Ms. Hardwick an e-mail complimenting her work and saying it was "always a pleasure" to work with her).

The United States Olympics basketball command structure tends toward the byzantine. USA Basketball is an umbrella organization that oversees the men's and women's basketball teams. The N.B.A., which also runs the W.N.B.A., a women's professional league, is a member of USA Basketball, and benefits commercially from its marketing successes.

But senior N.B.A. officials do not directly control the hiring, firing or disciplining of Olympic coaches.

On March 29, the N.B.A.'s chief counsel, Neal Stern, told Ms. Hardwick that he would look into her charges. She gave him a list of witnesses. A month later, he called back and said he had determined that USA Basketball's decision to remove her had nothing to do with Mr. Auriemma.

"I asked Neal Stern, 'Did you talk to any of the people whose names I gave you'?" Ms. Hardwick said. "He told me that 'This is the position the N.B.A.'"

Ms. Hardwick took pains to say that she loved her job and working for the N.B.A.

Ms. Hardwick said she was concerned that the lawsuit could jeopardize her career. "I'm very uncomfortable; I'm very disappointed," she said. "I do enjoy my job. But I don't really feel I have a choice. I'm being marginalized for standing up for myself."

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*Published online: 6/11/12