A long-running sexual abuse scandal that has prompted the Boy Scouts of America to consider bankruptcy flared anew this week, when a lawsuit filed in Philadelphia asserted that there were hundreds more possible sexual predators associated with the organization, beyond those already listed in its files.

A man now in his 50s who brought the lawsuit alleges that an assistant scoutmaster sexually abused him in the mid-1970s, when he was a young scout in Luzerne County, Pa., and that the organization’s “negligent, willful, wanton, reckless and tortious acts and omissions” allowed the abuse to happen. The lawsuit also accuses the Boy Scouts of engaging in a cover-up to hide “the extent of the pedophilia epidemic within their organization.”

The plaintiff’s lawyer, Stewart J. Eisenberg of Philadelphia, belongs to an alliance of lawyers called Abused in Scouting that formed this year after reports surfaced that the Texas-based Boy Scouts of America was considering filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. That step would make it more difficult to pursue legal claims against the organization and recover damages.

The lawsuit says that former scouts across the country have come forward to identify 350 possible sexual abusers who were not included in the Boy Scouts’ confidential files on volunteers who were excluded from the organization because of accusations of child sexual abuse. This year, an expert on child sexual abuse who had reviewed those files testified in another case that there were nearly 8,000 people listed in them.