A former close friend of right-wing Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told The Washington Post the lawmaker lied about a car wreck that partially paralyzed him.

Cawthorn’s account of the 2014 wreck — which he presented publicly in the chapel of his Christian college in Virginia three years later — was that a close friend had crashed the car in which he was a passenger, leaving him to die “in a fiery tomb,” the Post reported over the weekend.

But the friend, Bradley Ledford, told the newspaper in his first public comments about the crash that he pulled Cawthorn from the wreckage.

“It hurt very badly that he would say something as false as that,” Ledford told the paper. “That is not at all what happened. I pulled him out of the car the second that I was able to get out of the car.”