For about forty-eight hours this past week, an enormous chunk of the internet’s attention got hijacked by two people in black masks hanging off the top of a building. You know the story by now, or some version of it, because it was engineered to be impossible to avoid. A man and a woman climbed illegally to the very top of the Empire State Building, past the observation deck, past the areas tourists are allowed to see, all the way up to the antenna structure that sits 1,454 feet above the ground. Once they got there, they unfurled a banner, and then, in the moment that was clearly the entire point of the exercise, the man got down on one knee and proposed. Cameras rolled. Helicopters circled. New York police closed the streets below. And within hours, the whole internet had decided what it thought about it: either this was the most romantic thing anyone had ever seen, or it was one of the stupidest, most self-indulgent stunts to hit a news cycle in months. ABC News
I’m solidly in the second camp, and I want to explain why, because I think the reaction to this thing says more about us than it does about the two people who actually climbed the building.
Let’s start with who these people are, because that matters. This wasn’t some random couple who got a wild hair and decided to break into a skyscraper on a whim. The pair has been identified as Angelina Nikolau, who goes by Angela, and Ivan Kuznetsov, who goes by Ivan Beerkus. These are not amateurs. They are, by their own description and by the description of the streaming service that made a documentary about them, professional “rooftoppers,” social media influencers who engage in extreme risk-taking behavior, including breaking into restricted areas of commercial buildings, hanging from rooftops and free-climbing skyscrapers. This is their entire brand. They climbed the 1,955-foot Goldin Finance 117 in Tianjin, China, and Malaysia’s 2,227-foot Merdeka 118 for a 2024 Netflix documentary called “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” which Netflix itself describes, without apparent irony, as being about “daredevil influencers” who “risk their romance freedom and lives to climb a mega-skyscraper.” CNN + 3
So before we even get to the Empire State Building specifically, we should be honest about what we’re looking at. This is not spontaneity. This is content. This is a couple with an established media property, a Netflix credit, and a large social following, executing what is essentially a marketing stunt disguised as a marriage proposal, at one of the most photographed and recognizable buildings on Earth, in a media market that will amplify absolutely anything that looks dramatic enough. The romance angle isn’t incidental. It’s the entire product.
And to be fair to them, it worked, in the sense that it generated exactly the kind of coverage a stunt like this is designed to generate. But “it worked” and “it was good” are not the same thing, and I think a lot of the online reaction has quietly collapsed those two ideas into one.
Here’s what actually happened, mechanically, according to the reporting that’s come out since. The couple didn’t spontaneously scale the building in broad daylight from the sidewalk like some kind of urban Spider-Man moment. According to investigators, they had been planning this for a while, and the entry point was much more mundane and much more troubling than the finished product suggested. Sources told ABC News that the pair allegedly slept inside the skyscraper the night before in secret and appeared to have broken through a door to get to the antenna. A security camera reportedly caught them going through a hatch on the 102nd floor at around 5 a.m. Wednesday morning, and once inside, they allegedly went further, using tools to compromise security measures blocking the path to the top. The criminal complaint against them alleges that a lock on the security door to the building’s 104th floor, which provides access to the broadcast antenna, was broken, and that the couple used tools to loosen brackets so they could access a stairwell. ABC News + 2
That is not a stunt in the sense of an athletic feat performed by two very fit, very brave people scaling an exterior facade with their bare hands, which is the image a lot of the footage seems designed to conjure. That is breaking and entering, executed with premeditation, tools, and, per one analysis, likely some degree of surveillance beforehand. A former NYPD sergeant who now works in corporate security told a New York news outlet flatly that this was “quite a disturbing breach” and that whoever pulled it off had engaged in what security professionals would call pre-observational surveillance — someone cased the building beforehand, rather than stumbling upon the hatch that day. There is now active speculation, reported by NBC, that the couple may have had inside help to reach the 104th floor at all, which is a detail that should probably worry people more than the marriage proposal excited them. ABC7 New York + 2
And then there’s the antenna itself, which is where I think the “this was just a sweet gesture” narrative really falls apart. This isn’t a decorative spire. It’s a functioning broadcast tower, actively transmitting radio and television signals to local stations. A former chief broadcast engineer for a New York television station told CBS that the top of the structure exposes anyone up there to potentially dangerous levels of radio-frequency radiation and electrical energy, and said plainly, “There’s a lot of danger out there.” This wasn’t a hypothetical safety concern raised after the fact for dramatic effect. It was serious enough that first responders literally could not approach the couple while they were up there. According to the criminal complaint, officers had to wait a full thirty minutes for the antenna to be powered down before members of the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit could even approach the two individuals, because the antenna emits high-frequency radio signals powerful enough to harm the human body. When police finally did move in, they had to do it while wearing harnesses and climbing roughly 1,250 feet above the ground to reach the pair. Time + 4
Sit with that for a second. This wasn’t just two consenting adults taking a risk with their own lives, which is the frame a lot of defenders of the stunt want to use — “it’s their life, let them live it how they want.” Multiple other people were put in a position of real physical danger because of this. Trained emergency service officers had to climb over a thousand feet up an active broadcast structure, in harnesses, after a mandatory power-down that itself introduced its own risks and delays, specifically because two people wanted a viral engagement video. The NYPD commissioner called the bodycam footage of the rescue “harrowing” and said it “can take your breath away.” A former FBI deputy director, commenting on the incident, didn’t mince words either, saying the stunt put the city, the police, and the building’s owners in a “tough spot,” and adding that “the last thing that people who are responsible for the Empire State Building want is to turn this place into a target for that sort of activity, because ultimately it will end in some sort of tragedy. The danger here, the recklessness, is obvious and can’t be overstated.” CNN + 3
That’s not a killjoy quote from someone who hates fun. That’s someone with actual security expertise telling you, in plain language, that this thing everyone found charming for an afternoon is exactly the kind of behavior that gets someone — a climber, an officer, a bystander — killed eventually, if it becomes a template other people decide to copy.
And it will become a template, because that’s what happens with viral stunts. The building has apparently had a history of unauthorized climbs, both legal and illegal, and now it has a fresh, extremely high-profile example that got the couple worldwide media coverage, a documentary-adjacent afterglow, and — in the eyes of a large chunk of the public — a pass, because they framed it as a proposal instead of a stunt. If you’re a security consultant for any tall building in a major city right now, this is your worst-case scenario made real: someone found a way in, someone got all the way to the most sensitive, most dangerous part of the structure, and the public reaction, on balance, was “aww.”
Which brings me to the part of this that actually bothers me the most, more than the couple’s own decision-making: the way the building itself, and a huge portion of the online audience, immediately folded this into a wholesome love story instead of treating it as the security failure and public endangerment episode it clearly was. A spokesperson for the Empire State Building told reporters there was “at no time danger to tenants, visitors, and Empire State Building Observation Deck guests” — which, fine, technically true, the tourists downstairs were never in danger — and then went further, adding, with what can only be described as a marketing instinct kicking in mid-crisis, that the building “does offer a practical way for the most memorable marriage proposals.” The building’s own social media account leaned into the bit. Read that again. A skyscraper’s PR team, responding to an incident where trespassers broke security doors, tampered with hardware, and forced an active broadcast antenna to be shut off for half an hour while armed emergency officers scaled it in harnesses, chose to respond with a wink and a proposal joke. That is an institution actively participating in the laundering of a serious security breach into a feel-good story, presumably because being associated with “romance” is better for the brand than being associated with “we don’t know how two people with tools got past three locked doors to our broadcast tower.” NBC NewsNBC News
I don’t think that’s cynicism on my part. I think it’s just noticing what happened. The building had every incentive to reframe this as charming rather than alarming, because the alternative story — “our security completely failed and we got lucky it wasn’t worse” — is bad for business. And the public, for its part, had every incentive to go along with the romantic framing, because a proposal story is fun to share and a story about broken locks and irradiated antenna platforms is not. Everybody’s incentives pointed toward turning a security incident into a meet-cute, so that’s what happened, almost immediately, in real time, while the couple were still in police custody.
Meanwhile, the actual facts of the case tell a much less charming story than the highlight reel. Once they were arraigned, prosecutors described the pair, in court, not as a sweet young couple who got carried away in the moment, but in much more clinical terms: as social media influencers who engage in extreme risk-taking behavior, including breaking into restricted areas of commercial buildings, hanging from rooftops and free-climbing skyscrapers — a description that makes clear this is a pattern, a business model, not a one-off romantic impulse. They were hit with a genuinely serious list of charges: burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, possession of burglar’s tools, criminal tampering, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Those are not the charges you get for a spontaneous, harmless prank. Burglary and possession of burglar’s tools, specifically, point directly at premeditation — you don’t accidentally end up carrying tools capable of loosening security brackets. And notably, the charges were serious enough that they were not bail-eligible under New York law, though the couple were ultimately released under supervision pending an August court date. CNN + 2
Even the couple’s own attorney, while defending them, inadvertently underlined how much of this was performance. Asked about the overcharging complaint, he told reporters, “As far as what I’ve seen, and I’m sure you have all seen, it was a message of love. You know, that’s a nice thing.” Notice the phrasing. Not “it was a spontaneous act of love.” A message of love — something constructed, delivered, packaged for an audience. Even the defense is implicitly conceding that this was communication, aimed outward, not simply a private moment two people happened to have in an unusual location. ABC News
So where does that leave the online reaction, the one I started this piece annoyed about? I think a lot of people watched thirty seconds of drone footage — the flag, the kneel, the kiss, the ring — and had an emotional reaction to a beautifully shot proposal video without ever engaging with what it took to produce that video: the overnight break-in, the tampered locks, the powered-down broadcast tower, the harnessed officers climbing over a thousand feet in the air to physically retrieve two people who had voluntarily put themselves and, by extension, everyone tasked with responding to them, in danger. The footage is the product. The danger, the trespassing, the security failure, all the actual substance of the event, got edited out of the version that went viral, the same way it would in any piece of branded content, because that is functionally what this was.
And look, I get the appeal on a purely aesthetic level. There is something undeniably cinematic about two tiny figures against the New York skyline, nearly a mile up, unfurling a banner about love while the city grinds along beneath them, oblivious. It’s a good shot. It would be a good shot in a movie. But we’re not watching a movie, we’re watching two adults who have built a career out of manufacturing exactly this kind of shot, using illegal entry and property damage to do it, forcing a real emergency response, and getting rewarded for it with global attention and, from a lot of onlookers, actual admiration. If a random couple with no social media following had done the exact same thing — broken locks, overnight infiltration, forced power-down of an active transmitter, harnessed officers risking a dangerous climb to retrieve them — and it hadn’t ended in a proposal, I don’t think a single person online would be calling it romantic. They’d be calling it exactly what the charges say it was: burglary, reckless endangerment, and criminal mischief, dressed up with a ring at the end so nobody had to think too hard about the rest of it.
That’s the part that actually gets to me. Not that two extremely online daredevils did an extremely online daredevil thing — that’s basically their whole job, and I can’t say I’m shocked that risk-takers took a risk. What gets to me is how effortlessly the story got rewritten in real time, by the building’s own PR account no less, from “serious security breach forces emergency antenna shutdown and harnessed rooftop rescue” into “isn’t love wonderful.” It’s a reminder of how easily a genuinely alarming event can be reframed into a feel-good headline if you attach the right emotional hook to it, and how willing a huge audience is to accept that reframing without asking a single follow-up question. Nobody wants to be the person going “well, actually, they broke and entered and endangered first responders” in the comments of a proposal video. It’s not a fun position to hold. But it’s the accurate one.
So yeah — I watched the clips, I read the coverage, I saw the ring, the kiss, the banner about love beating the love of power, and after all of it, my honest reaction was: who gives a shit. Two professional stunt-influencers with a Netflix documentary broke into a skyscraper, damaged security infrastructure, forced an active broadcast tower offline, made a rescue team risk their own safety retrieving them, and got a global news cycle out of it because they happened to time a proposal at the top. Strip away the ring and the banner and you’re left with a story about trespassing and endangerment that nobody would have found charming for even five minutes. The romance wasn’t the point. It was the packaging. And I’m a little tired of watching packaging get mistaken for substance just because the lighting was good and the view was nice.