Chloe Ayling, pictured at the National Reality TV Awards in London in 2018, was abducted by two masked men in Milan, Italy. Photo / Getty Images
Chloe Ayling was released after six days in captivity, only to face an onslaught of suspicion and hostility.
Chloe Ayling, a glamour model from Coulsdon, south London, was attending what she had been told was a photo shoot for motorcycle leathers in Milan.
Upon arriving at the studio in July 2017, she was grabbed by two men in balaclavas, who injected ketamine into her arm and bundled her, gagged, into a holdall in the boot of a car. She was taken to a remote farmhouse where she was handcuffed to a chest of drawers before her agent was sent an email from someone claiming to be a “mid-high level contract killer” working for an organised crime group that traded in human beings.
He was then sent an ultimatum: hand over $300,000 within five days, or the 20-year-old would be auctioned as a sex slave on the dark web. It even included an advert: “Chloe: Caucasian; 34DD-25-35.” Attached were three photos of her in swimwear lying on the floor. The detective superintendent appointed to lead the case, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “I’ve seen dead people who looked in a far better condition.”
Ayling was a victim, first of the “mid-high-level contract killer” who turned out to be Łukasz Herba, a 30-year-old West Midlands-based Polish computer programmer described in court as “a fantasist with narcissistic tendencies”.
And then, after she was freed following six days in captivity, she became a victim of the Italian justice system, which published her name against her wishes, and the British media, which refused to believe the details of the seemingly harebrained plot. As a result, attention and scepticism soon switched to her strangely detached demeanour about the whole affair.
“What is it about me and this story that makes it so hard to believe?” she asks at the opening of each episode of a new three-part BBC documentary, Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping. The series follows umpteen tabloid stories about the model, appearances on a parade of ITV daytime sofas and a 2024 BBC dramatisation of the tale, Kidnapped.
Ayling’s difficulty in expressing emotion was one of the key reasons the press and public refused to take her story at face value. “Too happy, too composed, too relaxed,” summed up broadcaster Eamonn Holmes at the time. But in the documentary, she breaks down in tears as she recalls the harrowing details of her abduction.
The man she knew as “MD” served her a plate of rice cakes while telling her he was an assassin whose favoured method of murder was poisoning: “No one investigates a heart attack,” he said. He explained that he worked for an organisation called Black Death and that even if he wanted to release her, there were powerful figures above him who would not allow it.
Ayling’s natural stoicism gave her an extraordinary presence of mind during her ordeal. She calmly spurned Herba’s sexual advances, saying she was “not feeling it” while chained to furniture, but he “lit up” at discussion of what she might agree to once free. She reveals she “started talking to him about the future, to lead him on, and make him want to fight to release me”.
What Ayling was unaware of was that Black Death was not a far-reaching criminal enterprise, but an invention by Herba, and that he had enlisted the assistance of his brother, Michal, in snatching her from the studio.
When Ayling’s contacts failed to stump up the $300,000, Herba agreed to release her on condition she said nothing to the police and paid $50,000 within the month. He drove her to the British consulate, posing as a friend she had called upon her release. Neither of them knew that the officials there had been alerted to her abduction, and Herba was promptly arrested.
Ayling’s evidence helped convict him of kidnapping and extortion, with a prison sentence reduced on appeal to just over 11 years. If that were not vindication enough of Ayling’s account, the BBC series features exclusive interviews with the anonymous UK detective, from the Regional Organised Crime Unit, along with three officers from Milan Police and the judge at her kidnapper’s trial: all stand by Ayling’s version of events, the judge describing her testimony as “extremely precise, specific and detailed”.
Yet, eight years on, suspicion and hostility still stalk Ayling, who says: “The hate never went away”. It has ranged from a belligerent Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain to trolls on social media who have continued to post damning remarks such as “a lying mastermind, dumb but gorgeous”.
“The aftermath definitely affected me more, long-term, than the actual kidnap itself,” she tells the documentary makers. She was forced to stay in Italy for three weeks after her release and taken back to the site of her captivity by police keen to elicit a shaken response from a woman they were yet to believe.
After being cleared to return home, a frenzy of photographers camped outside her mother’s house. Persuaded that the only way to get rid of them was to go outside and talk, she stood smiling and delivered a short statement, while dressed in revealing clothing. In the documentary, Page 3 photographer Jeany Savage – who had shot Ayling’s Daily Star debut as a “Surrey sweetie” and “frilly thriller”– speaks for her detractors: “She appears in a little white top with her t*** hanging out. I mean, come on!”
Ayling, who describes herself online as a “multiple property owner”, is shown relaxing in her rural idyll in Snowdonia. But her mother “struggles with what’s happened”, the model says in a voice-over, and “won’t be doing an interview in this film”. Ayling’s son, a toddler during the kidnapping, is not even mentioned, nor is her 2018 stint in the Celebrity Big Brother house, or her sideline on adult content subscription website OnlyFans.
Nonetheless, Ayling appears to have learnt from her media journey. Unlike her appearances on This Morning or Victoria Derbyshire, in which she was seen in skimpy outfits and with voluminous blow-dried locks, she is interviewed here wearing a mint-green blazer and her hair in a demure bun.
She has also learnt something more profound about herself. In the final episode, she is filmed receiving a psychiatric report diagnosing Autism Spectrum Disorder. “There are difficulties in social interaction, communication and repetition,” it reads.
The diagnosis not only explains her “lack of expression, no matter how hard I try”, but also experiences that date back to childhood: “My mum would come on school trips,” she recalls, “because she was worried that I wouldn’t be able to say what I wanted.”
The case judge, Ilio Mannucci Pacini, says in the programme: “Interpreting the calm demeanour she showed as a sign of the absence of trauma is, I believe, a mistaken mechanism.” Or, as Ayling puts it more succinctly: “Not everyone has to fit in the same box.”