The Grammy-winning music executive Antonio Reid, who is known as L.A. and rose in the industry working with artists including Usher and TLC, has been accused of sexual assault and harassment in a lawsuit by Drew Dixon, who worked for Mr. Reid at Arista Records.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday, says that Mr. Reid, who was Ms. Dixon’s boss starting in mid-2000, assaulted her twice. When she successfully rebuffed him on other occasions, the suit says, he retaliated against her, blocking her ability to sign or cultivate artists, like a young John Legend. She left the company in 2002, and though she made forays into the industry again, she never fully recovered her promising trajectory as a music tastemaker.

Stepping back from a music career “was devastating,” Ms. Dixon, who facilitated the recording of a platinum soundtrack and several hit singles, said in an interview. “I have an opportunity now to seek some degree of accountability. And that’s really what I’m trying to do.”

Mr. Reid did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Wednesday. Representatives for Mr. Reid’s latest venture, mega, a music collective formed this year in partnership with Usher, said that they did not represent Mr. Reid personally and had no comment on the matter but that they had passed the request to his office. HarperCollins, which published his memoir, “Sing to Me: My Story of Making Music, Finding Magic, and Searching for Who’s Next,” in 2017, did not respond to requests for comment; nor did Joel Katz, a prominent entertainment industry lawyer who has worked with Mr. Reid in the past.

Mr. Reid, 67, has won three Grammys and appeared as a judge on “The X Factor” in a career of more than three decades. In 2017, he stepped down as chairman of Epic Records after an assistant accused him of sexual harassment. He went on to co-found another record label, HitCo, which counted Jennifer Lopez on its roster; the company was sold last year to the Concord Music Group.

Ms. Dixon’s complaint falls under the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law enacted last year that opened a one-year window for civil lawsuits from anybody who was older than 18 when they say that abuse occurred. Ms. Dixon, 53, was an advocate for the law. The look-back window closes on Nov. 24.

Ms. Dixon first spoke out in 2017, when she was one of three women who accused the music mogul Russell Simmons of rape in an article in The New York Times. (In a statement, he said, “I vehemently deny all these allegations.”) Ms. Dixon, who had worked with Mr. Simmons at his Def Jam label, which was among the first to bring hip-hop to the mainstream, repeated her accusations in the 2020 documentary “On the Record.” Her lawsuit against Mr. Reid states that Mr. Simmons raped her in 1995 but does not name Mr. Simmons as a defendant. Ms. Dixon said in an interview that she was still evaluating her legal options when it comes to Mr. Simmons. Mr. Simmons has denied Ms. Dixon’s and other accusers’ accusations in several settings, and told The Times in 2017 that “all of my relations have been consensual.”

Ms. Dixon left Def Jam and got a job at Arista, where she worked with the company’s founder, Clive Davis, and rose to become vice president of A&R. She was involved with a number of notable songs, including Whitney Houston’s “My Love Is Your Love” and “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay,” and the Carlos Santana hit “Maria Maria.”

In 2000, Mr. Reid, a founder of the influential Atlanta label LaFace, replaced Mr. Davis as president of Arista. Ms. Dixon said that their relationship, which had been professional and cordial when they knew each other as industry colleagues, changed quickly. “Almost immediately,” the suit says, he began “sexualizing and harassing” Ms. Dixon, then 29.

In January 2001, the suit says, Arista held a companywide retreat in Puerto Rico. Ms. Dixon was invited to fly alongside Mr. Reid and other executives on a private plane, then arrived and discovered that no other passengers were onboard. Mr. Reid, the complaint says, “asked her to sit next to him to go over materials for the presentation, and then he began playing with her hair, kissing her and digitally penetrated her vulva without her consent.” She spent the rest of the flight “in a daze,” the complaint says. Though the company had booked her a hotel room, she shared her assistant’s, and traveled home on a commercial flight.

Ms. Dixon then took pains to avoid being alone with Mr. Reid, who invited her to meetings in his room at the Four Seasons in Manhattan “night after night,” the suit says. She spoke with a life coach, to whom she disclosed the assault, about how to evade him while also maintaining her job; she was eager to keep her position not only for professional reasons but because a recent cancer diagnosis made her fear losing her health insurance, the suit says.

When Ms. Dixon succeeded at circumventing Mr. Reid’s advances, the suit says, he “retaliated against her by embarrassing her in front of others or otherwise being curt and unprofessional” and punished the artists Ms. Dixon had already signed, or wanted to sign: “Promotional and recording budgets were suddenly reduced dramatically or frozen altogether. Song demos and artist auditions were flatly rejected.”

“It was very clear that I was being punished because I would not comply,” she said in the interview.

After a work event later in 2001, when Ms. Dixon acquiesced and accepted an offer for a ride home from Mr. Reid in his chauffeured car — “a mistake,” she said in the interview — he assaulted her again, the suit says. The pattern of resistance and retaliation continued, the suit says, as Ms. Dixon “realized Mr. Reid would continue to stifle her career.”

In 2002, she left the company to attend Harvard Business School. Though she made forays into the music business afterward — working with Mr. Legend at his record label — the suit says that crossing paths with Mr. Reid “and his enablers” left her shaken, and she backed away.

“When you’re talking about someone’s career being under siege, there is this dance that happens — her trying to make sure that she doesn’t completely alienate him, but she does not want to succumb to being assaulted,” Kenya K. Davis, one of Ms. Dixon’s lawyers, said. “He was relentless. And in defying him, she paid the price.”

In the 2017 article about Mr. Simmons, Ms. Dixon accused Mr. Reid of quid-pro-quo harassment and sexualizing her in the workplace. Mr. Reid did not address her complaints directly but apologized if his words were “misinterpreted.”

“I’ll never get back the career that I built from scratch,” Ms. Dixon said in the interview. When she left the music industry, she lost money, credit, a reputation — facets of her life that the lawsuit seeks to address. “As this window comes to a close,” she said, “I’m trying in some way to make myself whole.”

Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting.