Joe Biden’s campaign has finally admitted that the former vice president was never arrested while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

A campaign spokesman said that Biden wasn’t arrested, but instead “separated” from a congressional delegation for a short period while at a South African airport.

“He was separated from his party at the airport,” Kate Bedingfield told reporters after Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, The New York Times reports.

“It was a separation. They — he was not allowed to go through the same door that the — the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg.”

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Ah, well that explains the confusion. He went didn’t want to go through the white door while the rest of the delegation went through the black door. Makes perfect sense. Easy to see how that can be confused with being handcuffed and arrested, you know, with those two doors and all.

Bedingfield went on with more of the far-fetched tale, saying Mandela, the political prisoner who eventually became the president of South Africa, later thanked Biden in Washington, D.C., for his “anti-apartheid work” — even though Sleepy Joe said he had thanked him for “being arrested.”

“Those are the facts. That’s what I know about it,” she said. “I’ve now told you everything I know about that trip, which happened in the mid-‘70s.”

“In at least three campaign appearances over the past two weeks, Joseph R. Biden Jr. has told a similar story as he tries to revive his campaign in states with more diverse voters. On a trip to South Africa years ago, he has said, he was arrested as he sought to visit Nelson Mandela in prison,” the New York Times reported.

“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Mr. Biden said at a campaign event in South Carolina last week. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.” Mr. Biden referred to his own arrest twice more in the next seven days, including at a campaign stop here on Tuesday where he spoke of getting arrested in South Africa between efforts to coax his wife to marry him. That proposal occurred in 1977, both Bidens have said.

Weirdly, though, Biden never mentioned the arrest in his memoir — and he’s never mentioned it on the campaign trail until now, a week before the vote in South Carolina, where blacks will play a large role in picking the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee.

The Times reached out to Andrew Young, a former congressman and mayor of Atlanta who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979. Young said he traveled with Biden on a trip to South Africa.

“No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either,” Young, 87, told The Times.

Biden embellishes the story each time he tells it. on Sunday, he added more details about Mandela.

“After he got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said at a black history awards lunch in Las Vegas. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”

There’s one other little detail worth noting: Biden says he was arrested in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg, a city in the northeast of the country. But at the time, Mandela was being held on Robben Island, near Cape Town in the southwest part of the country — The two sites are some 900 miles apart.