LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- A federal lawsuit unsealed on Thursday alleges more devastating details in the LMPD Youth Explorer Program sex scandal.
Amidst the near thousand pages, the lawsuit accuses Officer Bradley Schuhmann of sexually abusing a teenage girl, who was in the youth program, in his LMPD cruiser and other places. It also claims he asked for sexual pictures from her.
The lawsuit alleges that while on an explorer retreat in Atlanta, Georgia, the girl, listed only by her initials was confronted by several officers on the trip, including Lt. Curtis Flaherty, who led the youth program and Officer Kenneth Betts, who is currently facing criminal charges for sexual abuse.
The lawsuit claims the teenage girl was interrogated for an hour by Betts and Officer Julie Schmidt, who is also alleged in the lawsuit to have had cookouts for the underage explorers where alcohol may have been present.
The lawsuit then said that officers took her back to the hotel room after the interrogation, searched her things and took her phone without consent from the teenager or her parents, potentially with intent to confiscate or destroy any incriminating evidence.
“I can't believe this is happening in our police department. I can't believe this is how we treat the children participating in the program. This sounds a lot like a cover-up to me,” Metro Council President David James told WHAS 11 News.
In a long-awaited investigative report released just months ago, former U.S. Attorney Kerry Harvey concluded that there were mistakes made, "no massive cover-up” in the senior ranks of LMPD.
“The Kerry Harvey report is not a complete report and the conclusion that it came to that there were no cover-ups involved in the explorer case is an ill-founded recommendation at the very most because when you read these documents you understand that there was a cover-up,” James said.
The accusations against Schuhmann are just one of many new explosive claims in the documents that allege shady behavior by several officers in the Explorer Program, including the man in charge of it, Lt. Curtis Flaherty.
The lawsuit brings up multiple times where Flaherty and other officers knew about abuse allegations going on, especially when it came to alleged abuse by Betts.
The lawsuit mentioned a time where family was asked to "keep quiet" by Flaherty about alleged abuse.
James said Harvey had access to most of this information when doing the investigation ordered by Mayor Greg Fischer.
“Kerry Harvey, because of the records that he had knew that there was a cover-up, whether he called it a grand conspiracy or a massive conspiracy, there was a cover-up and it took place and unfortunately children were hurt in the meantime,” James said.
WHAS 11 News reached out to the Mayor’s Office for comment and received this statement from spokesperson Jean Porter:
►Contact reporter Heather Fountaine at hfountaine@whas11.com. Follow her on Twitter (@WHAS11Heather) and Facebook.