In the weeks since Rutgers hired Julie Hermann to forge a new path for the university’s athletics program, which was still reeling from the fallout of a coaching abuse scandal, Rutgers officials have unexpectedly had to defend their selection of Hermann against accusations of her misconduct dating to a coaching job she held in the 1990s.

Hermann was also at the center of a 2008 sex discrimination lawsuit at Louisville, where she was a senior athletics administrator. In that case, an assistant track and field coach said she went to Hermann to complain of what she considered sexist behavior and “discriminatory treatment” by the head coach. Within three weeks of her taking her concerns to Louisville’s human resources department, the assistant coach, Mary Banker, was fired.

The lawsuit, which holds Hermann largely responsible for the decision to fire Banker, is likely to intensify the roiling dispute at Rutgers over the hiring of Hermann in the wake of the Mike Rice abuse case. Rice, the university’s former men’s basketball coach, was shown berating players at practice in a video first broadcast by ESPN. The video led to the firing of Rice and the resignation of Tim Pernetti, the athletic director, after he and other Rutgers officials were criticized for suspending Rice rather than firing him when they first learned of the video. Rice’s replacement, Eddie Jordan, also had a rocky start to the job; the Web site Deadspin reported that he had not graduated from Rutgers, though his university bio said that he had. Jordan, a former N.B.A. coach, had been a star on the basketball team, helping lead Rutgers to its only Final Four appearance, in 1976.

State legislators and other critics have said that Rutgers should not have hired Hermann based on accounts that she was harsh to players on the volleyball team she coached at Tennessee in the mid-1990s. On Tuesday, some lawmakers and Rutgers donors called on Hermann to step down, and they said the athletic department had become an embarrassment for the university and its president, Robert L. Barchi.