Fagan himself has given differing accounts of why he broke into the queen’s bedroom and what he did when he got there. Their interaction is actually among the several things Netflix’s “The Crown” gets wrong about history. According to Good Housekeeping, the real Michael Fagan accused the show’s writers of taking a bit too much “artistic license” when it came to the character he inspired. In the series, with the queen in her nightie before him, Fagan’s character takes a political stand, complaining about the conservative policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claiming that they were “destroying the country.”

But as Fagan tells it, the real interaction between them was much less eventful. He said they really didn’t speak at all, that the monarch asked him what he was doing there before running out of her room to get help. He told The Independent in 2012 that she quickly ran past him and out of the room, “her little bare feet running across the floor.”

Fagan didn’t even really get in trouble for the deed. Back then, trespassing was a civil, rather than criminal offense, in England, and the queen must not have felt it necessary to press charges. He did spend a few months in a psychiatric hospital afterwards, and later spent four years in prison on drug charges. Fagan reportedly suffered a heart attack and a case of COVID-19 in 2020, but survived both.