This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays, we go way up. Our subject is those people who who looks at a skyscraper and sees a climbing wall, then goes up the outside with no rope, no permission, and no apparent fear of the pavement below. They almost always get arrested at the top. The interesting part from my perspective is what the justice system does with someone whose main victim is their own life expectancy.
A proposal at the top of the Empire State Building
Our newest case is fresh from this summer. On July 1, 2026, two climbers reached the top of the Empire State Building, unfurled a banner about peace and love, and one of them proposed to the other while balanced on the antenna. She said yes. Then they climbed down and were arrested, which is not the traditional way an engagement ends.
The couple, Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov, are not exactly new to this. They are the stars of a 2024 Netflix documentary, “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” which is largely footage of them climbing enormous buildings around the world. Police say they snuck in the night before, hid inside overnight, and popped out of a hatch on the 102nd floor around five in the morning. Prosecutors were not charmed. The two were hit with felony burglary, reckless endangerment, and criminal mischief, plus a small pile of misdemeanours including trespassing and possession of burglar’s tools. They pleaded not guilty and were released to await their next court date.
The French Spiderman and his frequent flyer arrests
No conversation about building crawlers is complete without Alain Robert, the Frenchman who has turned climbing skyscrapers into a life’s work. He has gone up more than 150 towers with his bare hands, holds a Guinness record for it, and has been arrested somewhere around 170 times along the way.
The punishments are almost comically small next to the spectacle. Manila once fined him about 18 dollars for “alarm and scandal.” Sydney charged him roughly 676 dollars. London went bigger, handing him a suspended prison sentence, a fine, and a ban on climbing any building in the United Kingdom, which he treated as a suggestion. For Robert, an arrest is simply the toll booth at the end of the climb. He pays and moves on to the next city.
When the climb leaves a mark
Not every climber walks away with a slap on the wrist, and this is where the law starts to make more sense. Maison DesChamps, who bills himself as the “Pro-life Spiderman,” scaled the outside of the Las Vegas Sphere in February 2024 as a livestreamed fundraiser. The problem is that he reportedly left about 100,000 dollars in damage on that very expensive glowing orb. He pleaded guilty, and in April 2026 a Nevada judge gave him 45 days in jail.
That is the wacky twist buried in a serious point. The climb that hurts nobody but the climber tends to end in a fine. The climb that wrecks somebody else’s property ends in a cell. The law, in its own roundabout way, is drawing a line between a stunt and a genuine harm.
So should any of this be a jail sentence?
I am generally opposed to jail as the answer to much of anything. It is expensive, it is blunt and it should be reserved for situations where someone is a real danger to other people. Most of these climbers are not that. The person clinging to an antenna at dawn is risking exactly one life, their own. There is no getaway car, no victim waiting at home, no ongoing threat to the public once they are back on the sidewalk.
That does not mean anything goes. When a climb causes real property damage, as at the Sphere, or genuinely endangers the people below or the first responders sent up after them, consequences are fair and the courts are right to take it seriously. But for the pure stunt, the one where the only person in danger is the one who chose to be, a felony charge and a jail cell feels like using a sledgehammer on a thumbtack. A fine and a bill for any cleanup, and a stern word from a judge usually fit the crime better than a jail sentence.
Somewhere between the daredevil and the prosecuting attorney is a sensible question worth asking each time one of these stories rolls in: who exactly was in danger, and does the punishment match the answer?
