The Empire State Building Climbers Flew One Banner About Love — The "Political" Flags Going Viral Are AI Fakes

Around noon on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, the NYPD fielded 911 calls about two people atop the building's broadcast antenna, roughly 1,454 feet above Midtown Manhattan ^[7][10]. Investigators identified the pair as Ivan Kuznetsov, 32 — known online as Ivan Beerkus — and Angelina “Angela” Nikolau, 33, Russian nationals living in East Orange, New Jersey ^[2][7][8].

According to the criminal case, they bought observation-deck tickets, hid inside overnight, and were captured on security cameras around 5 a.m. going through a hatch on the 102nd floor before loosening brackets on a security door to reach the antenna stairwell ^[9]. They spent roughly 30 minutes at the summit — where Kuznetsov appeared to propose to Nikolau — before descending into police custody ^[2][7].

The couple are the subjects of the 2024 Netflix documentary “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 18, 2024 and began streaming July 19, 2024, chronicling their long history of rooftopping — scaling skyscrapers without ropes or safety gear ^[4][5].

Every outlet that covered the scene described the same black banner: “When the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace” — a line popularly attributed to Jimi Hendrix ^[2][3][7]. Lead Stories reported that searches across Google News and Yahoo News surfaced no credible report of any other banner message at the building that day ^[1].

That single detail is the whole case. If only one banner ever existed, then every image showing a different message is, by definition, a fabrication. Reality has one version; the fakes have many.

Within hours, the genuine photo had been remixed into a spread of false variants ^[1]. Lead Stories catalogued images and videos falsely claiming the climbers — or copycats, including a supposed “grandmother” — displayed banners reading “Donald Trump is a pedophile,” “Trans women are men,” “Michelle Obama is a man” and “Only traitors help invaders” ^[1].

Each was engineered to travel: politically inflammatory text pasted onto a genuinely astonishing, already-viral image ^[1]. The messages spanned the spectrum on purpose — outrage bait for every audience, all bolted onto the same real stunt.

The forensic case is not a matter of opinion. OpenAI's own image-verification tool flagged the first fake as AI-generated, and the Hive Moderation detection tool scored one of the circulating videos at a 99.6% likelihood of being AI-generated ^[1].

One image was traced to doctored ABC News footage, with the original flag digitally swapped for the fake message; one of the videos was posted by accounts openly branded as AI content shops (“Blur Studios”) ^[1]. On visual inspection, tell-tale generation artifacts — unnatural motion, blending, and “mechanical” wind effects — gave the clips away ^[1].

This is a textbook “real event, fake payload” operation. The underlying stunt was true, spectacular, and everywhere — the couple's own Instagram post drew more than 1.4 million likes in a single day, according to the internet-culture archive Know Your Meme ^[6]. Once an image is that saturated, a fabricated caption quietly inherits its credibility.

Know Your Meme documented an AI-generated version of the scene posted the same day and a flood of parody edits, from an “extended warranty” gag to a Trailer Park Boys riff ^[6]. Manufactured reactions rode alongside the fakes: pundit Matt Walsh dismissed the real slogan as “the most cliched pointless Hallmark greeting card slogan,” while defenders shrugged, “God forbid a couple has a hobby” ^[6].

The genuine event was dramatic enough on its own. The building's broadcast antenna — which “emits high-frequency radio signals... powerful enough to cause harm” — had to be powered down for about 30 minutes before NYPD Emergency Service Unit officers could climb roughly 1,250 feet to reach the pair ^[9][10].

Both were charged with first-degree reckless endangerment, burglary, criminal mischief and several misdemeanors — eight counts in all, carrying a maximum of seven years in prison — and were released on supervised release on July 2, 2026, with a court date set for August 24, 2026 ^[8][9][10]. An Empire State Building spokesperson said the entry was unauthorized but that “there was no danger to building tenants, visitors or observation deck guests at any time” ^[7].

NYPD Chief Michael Lipetri called the stunt “unacceptable,” and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he would “much prefer” that people propose “within the bounds of the law and on the ground” ^[8].

Strip away the AI captions and the record is simple: two climbers, one banner, one message about love. Every version showing a political slogan is a fabrication built on a true photograph ^[1].

Before sharing a screenshot of a banner that conveniently confirms your politics, do what the fact-checkers did: search whether any established news outlet reported those exact words. Here, none did ^[1]. And when a single dramatic image starts surfacing with several different “quotes,” that divergence is itself the tell — the truth has one version, the fakes multiply.