Current GOP wunderkind Madison Cawthorn’s origin story propelled him to the forefront of Republican politics:  his education at the US Naval Academy canceled because of a 2014 car accident where he was left for dead by the driver, a God-inspired motivation for Para-Olympic glory, and a successful venture as a real estate investors.

But the stories he’s told–including one in the chapel of the Christian college he would eventually drop out of–turn out to be as fictitious as his claims of voter fraud in the 2020 November election, according to the Washington Post.

From the chancel of the church at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia in 2017, Cawthorn told the harrowing story of being left in a burning car after its driver, a friend named Bradley Ledford fell asleep at the wheel on the way back to North Carolina from a spring break trip to Florida.  After crashing into a concrete barrier, Cawthorn said, Ledford fled the scene, leaving Cawthorn to die in the flaming wreckage.

But in his first statements about the accident since Cawthorn entered politics, Ledford decries the story as a slanderous lie.

In fact, Ledford’s acts were downright heroic.  After freeing himself from the wreckage, Ledford worked with the help of a passing Good Samaritan to get his friend free from the burning crash.  The pair dragged Cawthorn–who had been asleep in the reclined passenger seat with his feet up on the dashboard, likely rendering the seat belt useless–to safety.

That’s not the way Cawthorn told it, however:

He was my brother, my best friend. And he leaves me in a car to die in a fiery tomb. He runs to safety deep in the woods and just leaves me in a burning car as the flames start to lick my legs and curl up and burn my left side. Fortunately, there was several bystanders who come by and they break the window open that they pulled me out to safety and they sat me down. The paramedics arrive and decided that I’m gone and I have no pulse, I have no breath. And I was, I was declared dead on the scene. For whatever reason, may it be adrenaline or divine intervention, I definitely believe it’s the latter, I had a deep inhale of breath.

That whole part about being declared dead?  Yeah… that’s a lie, too.  According to the accident report from the first responders to the accident, Cawthorn was incapacitated, not “declared dead.”

Cawthorn has also made part of his legend that–but for the car accident–he would’ve been at the Naval Academy, not at the lowly Patrick Henry College, where he only stayed for one semester after recording mostly D’s on his transcript, for a GPA slightly above 1.0.   That, too, is a lie:  he had been rejected from USNA prior to the accident.

According to a deposition related to a $3 million settlement with an insurance company, Cawthorn said his academic troubles were due to brain trauma from the accident that rendered him “suffering from a brain injury after the accident definitely — I think it slowed my brain down a little bit.  Made me less intelligent. And the pain also made reading and studying very difficult.”  (Court documents show Cawthorn continues to pursue a $30 million lawsuit relating to the accident.)

But according to Cawthorn, being in a wheelchair would not stifle his drive:  he was going to compete in the 2020 Para-Olympics in the 400-meter dash, he said.  But for his political victory which caused him to abandon training, he would have been on the team, he claimed.  Except he never competed in any qualifying races, and he wasn’t even listed in any rankings of competitors in that even–or for any Para-Olympic events.

Without these fables, Cawthorn’s resume is remarkably slim:  working at a Chik-Fil-A; interning at a local congressional office, and a real estate company that recorded no income in the year before he ran for office, the only time it operated.