A young man who says he was sexually abused at a Boy Scout camp in northeastern Pennsylvania by a supervisor who later committed suicide as he was about to go on trial filed a lawsuit against the national Scouting organization and its local affiliate Friday.

The plaintiff, now 18, says that he was sexually assaulted by Gregory Ritter, a 44-year-old first-aid supervisor at Camp Trexler in the Poconos and that the Boy Scouts’ negligence allowed it to happen. The abuse took place in the fall of 2008, when the plaintiff was 14, and followed months of “grooming” by Ritter, the lawsuit said.

Ritter was charged with involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and other offenses. He killed himself in January 2010 on the day his trial was supposed to start.

The lawsuit seeks at least $50,000 plus punitive damages from both the Boy Scouts and the local affiliate. It’s the latest in a series of sexual-abuse claims brought against the Boy Scouts of America or its affiliates amid the public release of thousands of so-called “perversion files” dating from 1959 to 1985. The documents chronicled a decades-long cover-up of abuse by scoutmasters and other adult leaders around the country.