A Los Angeles lawyer once celebrated by the Obama White House for fighting violence against women on college campuses now faces six felony counts for allegedly waging a yearlong campaign of abuse against his own girlfriend.
Los Angeles County prosecutors charged Cody McDavis, 32, with three felony counts of inflicting corporal injury on his girlfriend, two felony counts of stalking, one felony count of attempting to stop her from pursuing prosecution, and three misdemeanor counts of violating a protective order. The complaint, filed July 20 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, alleges McDavis "willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly" followed and harassed the woman, leaving her "fearing for the safety of herself and her immediate family."
The alleged conduct stretches from July 2025 through June 2026, a full year during which the 6-foot-8 former college basketball player allegedly terrorized the unnamed victim, then tried to keep her from going to authorities. Recommended bail sits at $550,000. McDavis is scheduled for arraignment on September 2.
Neither McDavis's defense attorney, Shawn Holley, a prominent criminal lawyer known for representing clients including Kanye West, Justin Bieber, and Lindsay Lohan, and who served on O.J. Simpson's defense team, nor his employer, the Los Angeles law firm Vedder Price, responded to requests for comment from The California Post.
The charges land with particular force because McDavis did not merely work in the legal profession. He built a public identity around protecting women from exactly the kind of conduct prosecutors now attribute to him.
McDavis played Division I basketball at the University of Northern Colorado before earning a law degree from UCLA. Along the way, he became a visible face of the Obama-Biden administration's "It's On Us" campaign, launched in 2014 to combat sexual assault on college campuses. The White House named him a Champion of Change for that work.
In 2019, McDavis launched a Change.org petition calling on the Power Five conference commissioners, the most influential conferences in the NCAA, to ban student-athletes with a history of violence. The petition gathered more than 280,000 signatures. That same year, Sports Illustrated profiled him under the headline "Cody McDavis Fighting to See Change in the NCAA Sexual Assault Policy."
He also worked alongside rape survivor and advocate Brenda Tracy to develop the "Tracy Rule," a policy designed to bar athletes with violent histories from competition. The NCAA has not adopted the rule, though some individual schools have voluntarily enforced it.
At the 2019 Voices of Solidarity event, where McDavis was named a Solidarity Honoree, he delivered an acceptance speech that, in light of the charges, reads less like advocacy and more like a script he never intended to follow. McDavis told the audience:
"The women in here who are doing this incredible work are told and told and told we want to hear your voice, but when you start talking, you get shoved down."
He continued:
"That makes me sick, I can't stand that."
He then addressed Tracy directly:
"You are a survivor, and what you say matters and we should be listening."
And in his 2019 petition, McDavis wrote:
"My name is Cody McDavis. I am a former Division I student-athlete and the prevalence of sexual violence in college athletics makes me sick. That's why I'm calling on the Power Five Conference Commissioners, the most influential conferences in the NCAA, to immediately ban student-athletes with a history of violence."
He called for banning athletes with violent records. Prosecutors now say he compiled one of his own, allegedly beating his girlfriend on three separate occasions serious enough to warrant felony charges, stalking her twice, and violating a protective order three times over the span of a year.
The sheer weight of the charging document speaks to what prosecutors describe as a sustained pattern, not a single incident. Three felony corporal-injury counts suggest repeated physical violence. Two stalking counts indicate conduct that went beyond the relationship itself. The felony charge for attempting to stop the victim from pursuing prosecution points to an alleged effort to silence her after the abuse occurred. And three misdemeanor counts for violating a protective order mean that even after a court intervened to shield the woman, McDavis allegedly refused to comply.
The timeline of the alleged conduct, July 2025 through June 2026, covers nearly the entire period of a year. The protective order violations suggest the court was aware of the situation at some point during that window, yet the alleged behavior continued.
Several questions remain unanswered. The victim has not been publicly identified. It is unclear whether McDavis has been arrested or remains free ahead of his September arraignment. Vedder Price has not disclosed whether it has taken any employment action. And the specific court that issued the protective order, and when, has not been reported.
The "It's On Us" campaign was a signature Obama-era initiative. It leaned heavily on male allies willing to stand up publicly against sexual violence. McDavis was one of its most prominent faces, a tall, telegenic former athlete with a law degree and a petition that attracted nearly 300,000 supporters. The White House held him up as proof that the culture was changing.
The culture may have changed. Cody McDavis, if prosecutors are right, did not.
This is a familiar pattern in progressive politics: the loudest voices on virtue often belong to people whose private conduct would not survive the standards they demand of everyone else. The Obama administration did not create McDavis's alleged behavior. But it elevated him without, apparently, any mechanism to verify that its champions practiced what they preached. The result is a White House-certified advocate for women now facing nine criminal counts for allegedly brutalizing one.
McDavis has not entered a plea. He is entitled to the presumption of innocence in court. But the gap between his public persona and the conduct described in this complaint is not a matter of interpretation. He told a room full of advocates that women who speak up "get shoved down", and prosecutors say he spent a year doing exactly that.
When institutions hand out awards for virtue instead of verifying it, the people who pay the price are never the ones on stage.
