Comedian Hannah Berner is calling out free solo climber Alex Honnold for his dangerous skyscraper climb.
Days after Honnold, 40, climbed Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan, in a livestreamed event for Netflix, Berner, 34, criticized the athlete for putting his family at risk of losing him forever.
“The things men do to not take care of their family, like, spend some quality time with your children,” Berner said during the Tuesday, January 27, episode of her “Giggly Squad” podcast with Summer House’s Paige DeSorbo. “And then having his wife watch, like he’s at war or something, was strange.”
DeSorbo, 33, said she thought the stunt should have been “illegal.”
“There are men that will literally throw a fit if their wife goes on, like, a girl’s weekend,” DeSorbo continued. “And this man’s like, ‘Hey, babe, so I might die tomorrow. You’re good with the kids, though, right?’ Like, what the f***?”
Alex shares daughters June, 3, and Alice, 23 months, with wife Sanni McCandless Honnold, who was present in Taiwan to watch her husband climb one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers without safety gear on Saturday, January 24.
DeSorbo added, “The things that men will truly do to not just speak to someone who went to school to become a professional psychiatric helper is crazy.”
DeSorbo also expressed concern that a child watching the livestream would get the idea to attempt dangerous climbs.
“I felt like a mom because I was like, OK, now if my child turned on Netflix, clicked this, and then all of the sudden thought he could scale our home, I’d be livid,” the reality star, who does not currently have any children, said. “And God forbid the guy fell, and my child is sitting there like, ‘huh?’”
Us Weekly reached out to reps for Honnold for comment.
Though Honnold did successfully climb to the very top of Taipei 101 on Saturday, host Elle Duncan recently revealed that Netflix had a plan for if he fell and died.
“There’s something to be said when five minutes before you go on air, someone slides you a card of what you’re gonna say if a person falls off the building and dies,” Duncan, 42, said on the “Awful Announcing” podcast on Thursday, January 29. “That was certainly not an experience I had ever had before.”
Netflix also aired the climb on a 10-second delay so that cameras could cut away if something happened.
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Duncan continued, “I had a card on my lap that basically was like, ‘We’ve experienced a fall and we’re going to get off air now and we will update you as soon as we can on Alex’s condition.’ They were going to cut away. We were on a delay. They were going to cut away to something very wide, so obviously we wouldn’t watch him fall. Then I was going to pop on camera, and I was going to make that statement, then we were going to get off air.”
Ahead of the climb, Honnold — who was also the first person to free solo climb El Capitan in Yosemite National Park — opened up to The New York Times about how his family affects his career.
“Do you censor your ambitions because of the family?” Honnold was asked.
He responded, “I mean, maybe not too much. Certainly no one’s ever goading me on. No one’s encouraging me to do harder things. Everyone’s kind of like, Why don’t you stay at home, play with the kids? So it means that if I’m going to do something, I have to be really psyched about it.”
When reminded that his family would be devastated if he died, Honnold said, “I mean, baby Alice wouldn’t remember. Baby June probably wouldn’t remember. She’ll be 4 in another month. It’d be felt, and obviously it’d be super hard for Sanni, but they’d be well provided for. I don’t feel like I’d be leaving them in the lurch. They wouldn’t even necessarily be traumatized their whole lives.”
