Thursday, March 28

‘Pro-Life Spider-Man’ says climb wasn’t about the Roe draft opinion


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Just before 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, people in San Francisco’s financial district gazed up and noticed a man free-climbing the city’s highest skyscraper, which measures 1,070 feet tall. Posting a video from inside the tower, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff reveled at the sight.

“Another day @SalesforceTower,” he tweeted with a heart emoji.

The man climbing the tower was Maison Des Champs, a 22-year-old antiabortion activist who calls himself “Pro-Life Spider-Man.”

“Too many conservatives are sort of seen as squares,” Des Champs told The Washington Post on Tuesday evening. So if people “see me and say, ‘Oh, wow, that guy’s kind of rad’ — and then they read into what I’m saying and it gets circulating — that’s sort of the goal.”

Police were waiting for Des Champs when he reached the top of the tower Tuesday morning, hours after Politico broke news that the Supreme Court appears poised to dismantle the abortion protections granted by Roe v. Wade. The activist climber was arrested and charged with trespassing and resisting arrest, a San Francisco Police Department spokesman said, adding that Des Champs was released from custody later that day.

The night before Des Champs scaled the building, Politico published a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion that signaled the court is ready to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision — which for decades has protected women’s right to have an abortion. The news on Monday night drew hundreds of supporters and opponents of abortion rights to demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court, and the protests continued on Tuesday. Des Champs’s stunt seemed to follow.

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But Des Champs told The Post that his climb less than 24 hours after the bombshell revelation was a coincidence. He said he had planned to scale the tower for a month to raise funds for antiabortion groups and, in the phone interview Tuesday evening, had only a vague understanding of the Supreme Court leak that has reverberated around the nation.

“So I’m not sure exactly what was revealed,” he said. “I didn’t really read it over close enough.”

But he did share general opinions.

“Any step or any document or item — or anything that happens that can go repeal Roe v. Wade — I think is a good thing,” he said, calling the 1973 decision “horrible” and arguing that the Constitution does not grant abortion rights.

Along with raising money for antiabortion charities, Des Champs said his main goal was to bring attention to a Washington, D.C.-based OB/GYN who was secretly recorded in 2013 talking about what he would do if a baby was born following an abortion procedure after 24 weeks.

“It was the strangest coincidence,” Des Champs said, noting that he skimmed the Roe v. Wade news only hours before he began climbing.

Des Champs, a Michigan native, told The Post that he’s a student at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and began rock climbing when he was a teenager. By no means is he an “elite climber,” he said, and rarely does he “free solo” on rock formations — meaning climb them without ropes or harnesses, as he did at the Salesforce Tower on Tuesday. Des Champs said he is much more comfortable climbing buildings, which he claimed are easier to scale than rocks.

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“If you don’t rock climb, it looks really hard,” he said. “But you know how to rock climb, it’s not that big of a deal.

In August, Des Champs scaled the Aria, a 600-foot-tall resort on the Las Vegas Strip, to protest coronavirus mask mandates. It was his first time climbing a building, he said, but he was disappointed by the minimal news coverage he received.

That’s when he decided to call himself “Pro-Life Spider-Man,” a way to get more media attention. The Salesforce Tower was his first stunt since assuming the identity, and he prepared for the climb by looking at images of the skyscraper on Google Street View.

The San Francisco Police Department said it was notified about Des Champs making his way up the tower just before 9:30 a.m. He was taken into custody at 10:50 a.m. when he reached the top. Des Champs said he knew he’d probably face criminal charges and plans to hire a lawyer, although he declined to say whether he’ll scale another building somewhere else.

But he did say he’s admired the Salesforce Tower for some time and has wanted to climb it.

“The building just has such an iconic look. It looks like it’s been there forever,” he said. “I mean, I had no idea it was built in 2018.”



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