The former CEO of OHSU Health has filed a lawsuit alleging that an investigation that led to his firing was tainted by bias, including racism, sexism and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Tarek Salaway, a healthcare executive with a $1.4 million salary who came to OHSU after a long career in California, was placed on an involuntary leave on March 10, less than three months after OHSU hired him. He was subsequently fired.

Salaway’s civil suit, filed on Friday in Multnomah County, alleges he was subject to wrongful termination, whistleblower retaliation and discrimination, and seeks $15.5 million in damages.

In response to the lawsuit, an OHSU spokesperson said Salaway’s termination was not related to concerns about alleged patient safety or quality, or bias of any kind.

“OHSU will vigorously defend against those allegations,” they wrote. OHSU is otherwise declining to comment on the pending litigation.

The investigation that led to the firing was set off by allegations that Salaway had made inappropriate and threatening statements about a colleague he was frustrated with, including a reference to strangling her and a statement that he was going to cut her throat.

In an anonymous witness statement released by OHSU shortly after Salaway’s firing, a hospital administrator who was leaving OHSU for another position reported learning of Salaway’s alleged threatening remarks about her. She told investigators that Salaway had frequently treated her with a lack of respect, failing to read her emails, talking over her without listening, and putting her down.

She reported feeling concerned about her personal safety and professional reputation, according to a witness statement she signed for OHSU’s internal investigation.

Salaway denies he ever made the threats, which he allegedly made in front of his executive assistant. According to the lawsuit, OHSU never received firsthand information about the statements from that executive assistant. The witness statements instead all came from people who learned about the remarks second- or third-hand.

The lawsuit alleges that the charge Salaway had threatened a colleague was rooted in virulent anti-Muslim sentiment “by painting a professional like Mr. Salaway as a violent individual.”

Furthermore, news coverage of the allegations has made him “untouchable” for future employment, the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit suggests a different explanation for what triggered the investigation into Salaway.

It alleges that OHSU’s investigation was a pretext to fire Salaway after he spoke up over perceived incidents of racist and sexist bias towards his colleagues, and clashed with OHSU’s Chief Medical Officer and its HR department over management decisions.

The lawsuit alleges that on March 9, one day before Salaway was accused of threatening his colleague and placed on leave, he had given that same colleague a verbal warning for an alleged comment questioning the qualifications of another physician, who is Black.

According to the lawsuit, Salaway found this questioning “distressing, unwarranted, and a belittling microaggression aimed at ‘tokenizing’ the physician.”

Salaway reported the remarks to OHSU’s Office of Civil Rights before raising them in a meeting on March 9 that included the head of HR.

According to the lawsuit, following that meeting, Salaway made remarks to his executive assistant, and a hand gesture, concerning his female colleague.

Neither the remarks nor the gesture were threatening. In Salaway’s account, he made an innocuous remark about the colleague’s imminent plans to leave OHSU.

“Accompanying these comments, Mr. Salaway made a hand gesture similar to a baseball umpire, moving his thumb from above his shoulder in a “strike three, you’re out” motion.”

According to the lawsuit, the following day, OHSU secretly locked Salaway out of all its facilities and placed him under police surveillance on March 10.

Salaway was then the subject of an employment investigation, which included at least eight statements from witnesses, most of whom criticized Salaway’s management style.

According to Salaway’s lawsuit, OHSU fired Salaway on March 18. In an email, OHSU President Shereef Elnahal said he had lost confidence in Mr. Salaway’s ability to lead, and mentioned specifically that he had not considered the comment allegedly reported by Salaway’s executive assistant.

Salaway’s lawsuit also alleges that he faced retaliation for an effort to give OHSU’s top nurse manager more authority to deal with boarding in the emergency department — a situation that Salaway characterizes as “at crisis level.”

Nurses in the department have raised concerns about serious overcrowding that has forced some patients to get care in the waiting room. They say the overcrowding has jeopardized OHSU’s ability to meet its obligations to be ready for incoming high-level trauma patients. Elnahal has said that the crisis should moderate as OHSU opens up more bed capacity in its main hospital later this year.

The complaint alleges that after Salaway was fired, the boarding situation in the emergency department triggered an onsite review by federal regulators. On Monday, an OHSU spokesperson said that claim was inaccurate.

“During an inspection this year, [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] identified unit-based inpatient hallway beds that were activated during the COVID pandemic as no longer appropriate for use at the current time,” they wrote.

OHSU has taken down the beds and fully resolved the issue, the spokesperson said, noting that “emergency room boarding was not a factor in this inspection.”

Salaway’s complaint also alleges that OHSU has tried to shape public opinion of him by redacting and omitting some witness statements and his own testimony from the public records it released to news organizations after his firing, including OPB and Willamette Week.

OPB has requested OHSU’s full investigative file related to Salaway, but the university has declined to provide it.

In June, OHSU sued to avoid complying with an order from the Multnomah County District Attorney, who had ruled that reporters and the public were entitled to the full file.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/08/18/former-executive-sues-ohsu-alleging-wrongful-termination-retaliation/