LOS ANGELES — Bill Cosby will not dignify “decade-old, discredited” claims of sexual abuse with a response, his attorney said Sunday.

Lawyer John Schmitt said the fact that the allegations are being repeated “does not make them true.”

The renewed attention to a dark chapter for Cosby began last month when a comedian, Hannibal Buress, assailed him during a stand-up performance in Philadelphia calling him a “rapist.”

One of Cosby’s accusers, Barbara Bowman, leveled allegations of sexual assault against him in interviews and in an online column for the Washington Post. Bowman wrote that in 1985, she was 17 when Cosby “brainwashed me into viewing him as a father figure, and then assaulted me multiple times.”

Cosby, who was never criminally charged in any case, settled a civil suit in 2006 with another woman over an alleged incident two years before.