The California man who publicly accused Comcast of getting him fired from his job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) after he complained to the highest levels of Comcast about his year’s worth of billing errors, has made good on his threat to sue his former ISP. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco late Thursday.

Among other accusations, Conal O’Rourke is suing Comcast on allegations of violating the Cable Communications Act by disclosing his personal information to his employer, defamation, breach of contract, emotional distress, and unfair business practices.

“We don’t normally comment on pending litigation and as we have said, there were clear deficiencies in the customer service that we delivered to Mr. O’Rourke," Jenni Moyer, a Comcast spokesperson, told Ars in a statement.

"Comcast had nothing to do with PricewaterhouseCoopers’ decision to terminate Mr. O’Rourke. Once again, we apologize to Mr. O'Rourke for his service issues. We said we were determined to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with Mr. O’Rourke’s service and we are doing that. As part of this investigation, we have listened to recorded calls between Mr. O’Rourke and our customer service representatives and his treatment of them and language is totally unspeakable. Mr. O'Rourke's claims are without merit."

Ars asked Moyer if the company would be willing to publish such recordings with O'Rourke's permission, and she said she would check with her colleagues.

UPDATE 3:40pm CT: Moyer said that Comcast declines to release the recordings, citing the lawsuit that was filed.

As Ars reported previously earlier this month, while Conal O’Rourke’s story sounds crazy on its face, he provided Ars with an astonishing amount of documentation: he has pages and pages of error-filled Comcast invoices. The San Jose man has a detailed log of his actions, photos, notes, business cards, and complaint letters.

His attorney’s offer to settle the case prior to filing the lawsuit against Comcast consisted of "a full retraction and apology, his re-employment with his former employer, and $100,312.50" went unanswered.

Once O’Rourke’s case became public, a Comcast senior vice president apologized for the company’s behavior in "not making things right," but maintained that "nobody at Comcast asked for him to be fired."

UPDATE 3:43pm CT: Harmeet Dhillon, one of O'Rourke's attorneys, sent Ars an e-mail responding to Comcast's statement.

"It is unclear whether Comcast is accusing our client of using profanity, or simply being angry after months overcharging and broken promises to resolve his billing problems," she said. "In any event, being angry or using profanity isn't illegal. Even reciting a George Carlin routine in frustration at utterly incompetent and abusive 'customer service' isn’t illegal. Violating the privacy of a cable subscriber and defaming him to his employer, is."

"Comcast unequivocally denies your assertion"

As Ars reported earlier, O’Rourke told Ars that after a year’s worth of billing errors that he tried to get rectified both on the phone and in person in Comcast stores, he finally called the offices of Comcast’s controller, its highest accounting executive, Lawrence Salva.

O’Rourke claimed that someone within Salva’s office immediately began conducting Internet research on him and determined that he was a PWC employee. (According to Salva's bio, before joining Comcast in 2000 he was "a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers for over 12 years.")

An initial July 2014 demand letter to Comcast written by another one of O'Rourke's lawyer, Maureen Pettibone Ryan, describes what allegedly happened next:

Because Comcast was a major consulting services client of PWC’s, someone from the Controller’s office contacted Mr. Joseph Atkinson, a partner in the Philadelphia office of PWC, and falsely told Mr. Atkinson that Mr. O’Rourke had invoked his employment with PWC in an attempt to somehow obtain leverage in his negotiations with Comcast. Mr. Atkinson informed Mr. O’Rourke that the client was very valuable, was the Philadelphia office’s largest client with billings [REDACTED], that the client was very angry as a result of Mr. O’Rourke’s complaints, and that Mr. O’Rourke was not to speak with anyone from Comcast. While all of this was happening, Comcast continued to communicate sporadically and ineffectively with Mr. O’Rourke, setting up two service appointments that they missed without explanation on February 7, 2014 and February 11, 2014.

O'Rourke says that on February 7, 2014, he was subjected to an internal PWC ethics investigation as a result of the call to the controller's office. On February 18, O'Rourke was terminated. O'Rourke's letter says that he was "shocked, humiliated and ashamed based on the unjustified loss of his job. He sought counseling and was prescribed medication to address his emotional distress."

O’Rourke told Ars that his firing came as a complete shock. "I was totally taken aback," he said. "I was numb. I was absolutely numb."

On August 18, Comcast’s senior deputy corporate counsel, Thomas Nathan, responded to Ryan, telling her that Comcast had not received Ryan's letter in time to meet her deadline for action. So Ryan sent a second letter.

Nathan's response letter does acknowledge that "Comcast communicated to PWC that a person claiming to be a PWC employee had called our chief accounting executive's office with complaints about his cable service and bills, and yelled at our employees who tried to assist him."

But Nathan asserts those statements were "neither untrue nor unprivileged. As such, they cannot be defamatory. Comcast unequivocally denies your assertion that it requested PWC to fire Mr. O'Rourke."