Two people climbed to the top of the Empire State Building’s broadcast antenna Wednesday afternoon, unfurled a banner, and got engaged in front of millions of social media viewers and a wave of well-wishers already dreaming up a wedding to rival Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s. Except the engagement increasingly looks like scripted performance art, according to the bride-to-be’s father, who said they have been married, while the criminal complaint filed against the couple confirms something far less romantic: the stunt put them in the path of RF radiation strong enough to cause real harm, and their arrest could have possibly endangered the lives of police officers sent to bring them down.
The Climb
Angela Nikolau, 33, and Ivan Kuznetsov, 32 — who goes by Ivan Beerkus professionally — reached the top of the spire around midday Wednesday, roughly 1,454 feet above Midtown Manhattan. Dressed in black and wearing masks, the pair free-climbed the antenna’s supporting structure and unfurled a banner reading “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace” before descending to a work platform, where Kuznetsov produced a ring and proposed.
NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit could not immediately approach the pair. According to the criminal complaint, an officer told prosecutors that the antenna “emits high-frequency radio signals that are powerful enough to cause harm to the human body” and, as a result, had to be powered down before officers could reach the couple. First responders waited roughly 30 minutes for the shutdown to conclude before approaching, taking the pair into custody without incident just before 1 p.m.
That 30-minute wait is itself telling. It means the antenna was not powered down the moment Nikolau and Kuznetsov were spotted and began their climb. By the complaint’s own timeline, the couple spent their entire climb, their time atop the spire, and a meaningful stretch of their descent standing in an RF field the NYPD’s own officer described as capable of causing harm to the human body. Whatever protection luck or positioning provided, the record now shows plainly that they were exposed to dangerous RF levels for a real stretch of time before anything was shut off. As one industry observer said, “They might want to add a sperm donor to their bridal registry.”
Attorney is grasping at straws
Both were charged with burglary, first-degree reckless endangerment, second-degree criminal mischief, violation of local law, possession of burglar’s tools, criminal tampering, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Nikolau and Kuznetsov spent the first night of their engagement in separate holding cells before appearing Thursday morning in Manhattan Criminal Court, still wearing the same black clothes they’d climbed in. They both pleaded not guilty.
They could face up to seven years in prison if convicted.
Their attorney, Jason Krinsky, said the district attorney’s office had “overcharged” the case and was “trying to send a message,” calling the climb “a message of love.”
His statement — that wind speeds “were very low speed on the day, like 5-6 miles per hour” — misses the actual danger entirely. Wind conditions have nothing to do with why free-climbing an exposed structure 1,454 feet up is reckless. The danger is the free-climbing itself. Professional tower climbers are tied off 100 percent of the time precisely because a single slip is fatal regardless of whether the air is calm or gusting, and a fall from that height wouldn’t just kill the climber — it risks striking people or property below. Calm wind doesn’t make an untethered climb safe; it just removes one variable among many that could have killed them. The claim is unlikely to hold up against a reckless endangerment charge built on the simple fact that neither of them wore so much as a harness.
Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Janice Chen granted supervised release — “at a low level,” as she put it — with the couple’s next court date set for August 24.
Kuznetsov told detectives he’d wanted to “do something special for his engagement,” and told reporters afterward, simply, “We love New York.” The couple left court holding hands and kissed for cameras before entering the Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall subway station.
The pair, who communicated with the court through a Russian translator, declined to answer reporters’ questions about how the stunt was planned.
A law enforcement source told CNN that authorities suspect Nikolau and Kuznetsov aimed to monetize their social media accounts and generate publicity for another documentary.
How They Got There
Two different accounts of the couple’s access have emerged since the arraignment, and together they sketch a fuller picture than either alone. According to law enforcement sources cited by the New York Post, Nikolau and Kuznetsov bought tickets Tuesday night at 9 p.m. and are believed to have hidden inside the building overnight, emerging near a 102nd floor hatch at roughly 5 a.m. Wednesday, with Kuznetsov using tools to loosen brackets securing metal cables stretched across a stairwell to clear a path forward.
The criminal complaint itself, as detailed by ABC News, focuses higher up: it alleges the lock on the security door to the building’s 104th floor — the level that provides direct access to the broadcast antenna — was broken.
Reaching the antenna normally requires a key card to pass through secure doors on the 102nd floor leading to the restricted 103rd and 104th floors.
Nikolau and Kuznetsov had no such credential. Investigators believe they instead observed building employees getting past the initial screening undetected, then physically defeated the key-card-secured door once they reached it — consistent with both the broken lock the criminal complaint found on the 104th-floor security door and the burglar’s tools charge filed against them.
Notably, security at the site was supposed to have been strengthened following prior incidents in which trespassers attempted to reach the spire to take selfies.
Taken together, the burglar’s tools charge fits both descriptions: tools used on cable brackets in a stairwell on the way up, and a broken door lock on the 104th floor, providing final access to the antenna structure itself.
What They Climbed Past
The spire carries the transmission load for a large share of New York City’s commercial broadcasters. On the FM side, the couple climbed past the master antenna — home to 15 major NYC FM stations, including WCBS-FM (101.1), Hot 97 (97.1) and WPLJ (95.5) — as well as the building’s “mini” master antenna. The very top of the spire, where the banner was displayed, is the old top-mount master antenna that historically carried the analog signals for WNBC and WNYW. It is believed the FM batwing antenna below where they were perched is not energized.
A Proposal, or a Performance?
Nikolau’s father, Dmitry Nikolau, told ABC News the couple was already married and that the climb, banner and on-camera proposal were staged as a “performance.” Neither Nikolau nor Kuznetsov has publicly confirmed that account, and the arraignment, charges, and supervised release proceeded Thursday as though the engagement were exactly what it appeared to be on camera. Whether the moment was genuine or scripted, the security and RF exposure questions it raised are not in dispute.
Not Their First Skyscraper
Nikolau and Kuznetsov are Russian “rooftoppers” now based in East Orange, New Jersey, documented in the 2024 Netflix film “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” which followed their ascent of Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka 118, the world’s second-tallest building. The Empire State Building’s management said the incident was unauthorized but posed no danger to tenants or visitors; the observation deck reopened later the same afternoon. The building’s rules explicitly prohibit masks and costumes, which the pair wore throughout the climb.
The Access Question that Security Should Ask
Ron Romano, a long-retired broadcast tower technician who worked on the Empire State Building’s antennas years ago, said security at the site was stringent even before September 11 reshaped how the building thinks about access. “I’m shocked that they were able to reach the mast,” Romano told WirelessEstimator, adding he was also concerned about the pair’s exposure to what he called “serious RF levels” — a concern the criminal complaint’s own language now substantiates. Romano, a former board member of NATE: The Communications Infrastructure Contractors Association and one of the early pioneers behind formalized climber safety procedures in the tower industry, said he was taken aback that the two were able to free-climb the structure at all.
His own history with Manhattan’s broadcast infrastructure carries a frightening footnote: his Illinois-based company spent nearly 14 months completing NBC’s digital conversion work atop one of the World Trade Center towers, wrapping the project and leaving the site just two days before September 11, 2001.
It’s reasonable to expect building security will tighten access protocols as a result, especially given this wasn’t the first attempt on the spire. But the more sobering read is the one the charges themselves suggest: this was, by every account, a foolish stunt built on unrequited love of attention rather than any intent to do harm. Someone actually trying to disrupt New York City’s broadcast infrastructure, rather than proposing to their girlfriend on top of it, would have found the same route just as easy to use.
A similar 2024 breach of security
Isaac Wright, an urban explorer photographer known as “Drift,” pulled off a similar climb to the Empire State Building’s spire in 2024, reaching the structure by taking the elevator to the 102nd floor before slipping past security cameras and a locked gate. He photographed himself at night standing on top of the mast’s red obstruction light, hanging onto a lightning rod in an image he titled “Empire State of Mind.”
The photo went unnoticed by authorities for months until Wright displayed it at his own gallery opening in Chelsea in May 2025 — where NYPD officers arrived and arrested him, using the photograph itself as evidence. Wright was charged with third-degree criminal trespassing, a class B misdemeanor, but was held on $400,000 bond and spent months in jail before accepting a plea deal requiring $5,500 in restitution and a court-ordered treatment program. The charges were formally dropped in October 2025 after he completed the program.
A Structure With a History of Broadcast Advancements
Wednesday’s climb wasn’t the first time the antenna structure has been the subject of close attention — it was, in fact, the site of one of the more inventive broadcast construction projects in the building’s recent history. In 2016, Empire State Realty Trust began a tower restoration project to install a new auxiliary Master FM Radio antenna, which was completed in 2017 and used what the building described as the largest known construction enclosure ever assembled atop an occupied skyscraper: a protective “cocoon” built around the base of the antenna tower.
The cocoon extended the crew’s workable hours from a five-hour daily window dictated by observatory operating hours to a full 24-hour schedule, including during inclement weather, while also sharply reducing the sidewalk scaffolding needed at street level.
The new antenna installation included a radio-frequency-shielded climbing aperture, allowing technicians to work on the tower without forcing a shutdown of existing broadcast signals — the same live-RF problem that made Wednesday’s unauthorized climb so dangerous.
The project, led by JLL and Skanska, also installed what was then the world’s largest known FM combiner, enabling all 19 FM stations on the tower to transmit through the newly built Master FM Radio antenna.
Both the antenna and the combiner were designed and manufactured by Electronics Research, Inc. (ERI), which has now built and installed four separate Master FM antennas atop the Empire State Building since the original ERI master antenna replaced the pioneering Alford antenna in the 1990s.
