Chloe Ayling was vilified on social media by people who didn't believe she had been kidnapped. Photo / Instagram
The model was vilified on social media and in the press, her experience dismissed as a publicity stunt. Now, with a new drama setting the record straight, she tells Julia Llewellyn Smith about her ordeal.
In 2017, Chloe Ayling, a 20-year-old glamour model from Coulsdon, south London, flew to Italy for what she believed was a legitimate job. After she was drugged with the tranquilliser ketamine and stripped down to her bodysuit at a warehouse in Milan, Ayling was driven 190km to a remote farmhouse. She was told she would be auctioned as a sex slave on the dark web, then fed to tigers when the purchasers bored of her. But after six days her kidnapper drove her back to Milan and dropped her at the UK consulate.
Ayling had survived a terrifying ordeal. But what came next, she says, “had a much longer-lasting impact than the kidnap”.
Rather than being pitied for the trauma she’d endured, Ayling was vilified. Her kidnappers — Polish brothers Lukasz (the mastermind) and Michal Herba — were immediately arrested and charged by the Italian authorities. But before their trial their lawyers put out the story that the kidnapping was in fact a publicity stunt to raise Ayling’s profile.
The public bought it wholeheartedly. Everything about Ayling was questioned. Why on her return to the UK (after three weeks in Italy while police investigated) did she talk to reporters outside her house in tiny shorts and top? Why was she smiling as she intoned, “I feared for my life, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour”? This wasn’t victim behaviour, sniped the internet. Why did she later appear on Celebrity Big Brother?
Why was she caught on CCTV holding hands with Lukasz on a shopping trip to buy shoes in the local village? Why did she not tell police about the outing? Piers Morgan aggressively interrogated her about this on Good Morning Britain. “If you’re going to conduct media interviews where you’re being paid money, and you’re doing a book for thousands of pounds before there’s even been a trial, I think we’re perfectly entitled to ask you difficult questions,” he said. Ayling insisted, “It will all come out in the end.”
Sure enough, in 2018, Lukasz Herba was sentenced in Italy to 16 years for kidnapping and extortion. The sentence’s length reflected that Ayling could have been killed by the ketamine or suffocated in the car boot. Michal was tried and given a similar sentence the following year.
Ayling should now have been vindicated. Yet seven years later, the mud-slinging persists. “I wanted to be positive and move on, but it still goes on,” Ayling says. “I feel like there was no [acknowledgment] of what I went through. I was never praised for my bravery getting out of that situation. Instead, I always have to defend myself.
“I saw people online judging if I was lying by analysing my body language in interviews. There’s a reason body language experts are not called to give evidence in court. So stupid!”
So what about the sexy press conference outfit? “That’s how I dress on a hot day — it was actually modest for me. Yes, I was smiling — I’ve always been like that. As a kid, I never wanted anyone to see me cry. The other kids would make a big drama, but I could have the biggest cut and I’d hold in tears. So I was just trying to put on a brave face.”
She cashed in because, “I love turning bad things into positives. Plus, I hated people saying stuff that wasn’t true. I wanted to be questioned and answer those questions.”
But responding was tricky. Nothing appeared to make sense because Ayling’s kidnapping was a freakish one-off, the plan of “a fantasist with narcissistic tendencies”, as Lukasz was described in court (he was also extremely incompetent), with complexities that couldn’t be explained in tidy soundbites.
It is also hard not to perceive misogyny and classism in the way Ayling was treated. She was buoyed by one supportive message (among thousands of hostile ones) saying if she was “a snivelling mousy-haired woman” or a teacher she would have been believed. But in the intervening years, she’s realised it’s not just young models who are scrutinised by an online jury. She mentions the recent disappearance of British teenager Jay Slater in Tenerife, which inspired wild conspiracy theories, adding to the family’s distress. They only tapered off after his body was discovered.
“He wasn’t a model and he still got all that. Unless there’s concrete evidence like CCTV, victims are not believed. The only way you can prove people wrong is to be found dead. Until then, people have free rein to say what they like.”
Now, Ayling is hoping she’ll finally be exonerated by a new six-part BBC drama, Kidnapped, in which she’s played by Nadia Parkes. The series tells her story in great detail (she was paid in an advisory capacity), including a thorough account of the Herbas’ trials, which, Ayling feels, were hardly reported in the UK.
“Seeing it gave me chills because it’s such a relief. People will see all the evidence against [the Herbas] laid out word for word, without bias. At the time everything was so focused on me and no one was interested in how the brothers were changing their story every second to completely contradictory ones.”
Was reliving the kidnapping traumatic? She shakes her head. “I was just focused on making sure the drama did justice to what I went through.”
We’re sitting in the office of The Times. Now 27 and dressed in a black tracksuit, Ayling is petite and prettier in the flesh than in photos, where she’s glammed to the hilt. She says in her memoir, Kidnapped, that her mother calls her “cold”, but she’s friendly and upbeat. Yet she’s also patently an impassive type — confusing for those expecting the traditional weeping victim.
“I don’t like to overthink stuff and worry,” she says with a shrug. She doesn’t dwell on the terror she experienced. As for the trolling, it’s “a drag”.
“But I have an ‘it is what it is’ mentality. Nothing I do will change things. I know the truth and everyone who’s looked into my story knows the truth. My friends get more worked up about it than I do. Mum’s the opposite of me, an emotional person, so she struggles. She’s fallen out with almost everyone in her neighbourhood by defending me.”
Ayling received no counselling. “I’ve never believed in therapy. I have to change my mindset by myself.”
She’s pleased when I tell her I found Kidnapped fascinating, packed with vignettes that seem to prove the brothers’ guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Take the fact phone and computer records showed she and Lukasz had never previously been in contact — rubbishing his claim they’d plotted the abduction together.
Or take the scene when Lukasz is asked why, if he was in cahoots with Ayling, he gave her a potentially lethal ketamine dose. This was so traces would be found in her blood, he explains, but then can’t remember how it was administered, eventually saying she sniffed it. When told it was injected, he agrees that, yes, it was injected in her thigh.
“It was in my wrist,” Ayling says. “I always think he must feel so embarrassed because he probably genuinely believed what he was saying about being a saviour and powerful when I was being held. But then in court he got ripped apart.” She starts laughing. “He said to his girlfriend in England he was in Texas running a chicken-feed business when he was kidnapping me. He told the police he had leukaemia and had to raise money for his treatment. The ridiculousness of it all has helped me get over it — it’s just so crazy.”
After the kidnapping, she lost friends: some had sold stories about her; models she’d hung out with mocked her by filming themselves for a WhatsApp group climbing into a suitcase and demanding £20 ransom. “Now I only have a handful of people I trust: my manager, a couple of friends from school.”
She has no idea why Lukasz, who was then living with Michal in the West Midlands and working as a recruitment manager, chose her as his victim.
“Maybe he wanted me to be his girlfriend? He could have gone about it a different way.”
Ayling is the only child of an English father, with whom she has no contact, and a Polish mother, who worked as an interpreter. At school, she did well. “But I wasn’t into going down the university route. I wanted to start working immediately. I’d done one day’s work experience in an office and hated it. I have a business mindset, so I always said I’m going to be in control of my work.”
People suggested “glamour” — in other words, topless or scantily clad modelling. “I wanted to combine beauty with brains. It allowed me to travel. It was a good industry at the time — my first job was page 3 [of the Daily Star].” Was she shy about stripping? “It was fine. It came naturally.”
Aged 17, she became pregnant and had a son, who is now eight. After the kidnapping, his father, her ex-boyfriend Conor, told the press he had virtually sole charge of their son because Ayling was too busy working. Now she doesn’t want to discuss her son, who doesn’t feature in the BBC drama. In her memoir she explains, “Of course he is part of my story, but I don’t want him to be involved in the horror. I want to protect him from it,” and also mentions him “sleeping upstairs”.
In captivity, Lukasz told Ayling she’d been kidnapped by a Romanian crime group called Black Death. He was one of their foot soldiers but felt sorry for her. In fact, there is no Black Death and only the brothers were involved, but Ayling had no way of knowing this. Seeing Lukasz was smitten with her, she decided her best chance of survival was to encourage his affections, promising him they might be a couple “in the future”. He unchained her from a radiator so she could share a bed with him (they never had sex). Her reluctance to emote held her in good stead. “Lukasz said, ‘You’re taking this really well. Most girls would be screaming.’ But I knew that wouldn’t achieve anything. It would just annoy him.”
It’s unclear how much Lukasz was also motivated by money. Initially, he told her Black Death wanted a US$300,000 ($498,000) ransom and sent an email to her agent demanding the amount. One friend offered £20,000 ($42,000). But for unknown reasons, possibly because he hoped for an ongoing relationship with Ayling, after six days he instead took her to the consulate. He told her to say he was a stranger who’d helped her after she was released in the middle of nowhere, but that story quickly collapsed and he was arrested. Ayling was terrified Black Death would harm her family in retaliation. “That was the most stressful time for me. I was released but still felt trapped. Once I learnt there was no Black Death, I was so relieved.”
It was that same terror of Black Death, she says, that stopped her trying to escape when, four days into the kidnapping, Lukasz took her shoe shopping — when they were caught on CCTV. Originally, she didn’t tell police about this incident because she was exhausted and thought it was too complicated to explain. Many criticised her cosying up to Lukasz. “You shouldn’t tell someone how to act when you’re not in that situation,” Ayling says coolly. “If I was to imagine this happening, I wouldn’t necessarily think of behaving how I did. But it just becomes an instinct, when you’re relying on that power over him to be able to get out. I wouldn’t change anything I did in captivity. It led to me being released.”
Ayling’s still modelling, although since Covid her industry’s moved almost entirely online. Her Instagram account, mainly shots of her in skimpy knickers and bras, has 211,000 followers and she also has an Only Fans account where people can pay to “come and chat with me 1-1″, with the promise “all natural” enhanced by a peach and melon emoji.
She points out she has no idea how life would have turned out without the kidnapping. “But I’ve definitely had some amazing experiences that wouldn’t have happened without it,” she says, another example of refusing to stick to the “my life’s been ruined” script.
She’s travelled to 26 countries, drives a Range Rover and owns a house in Florida, where she lives half of the year. In the UK she’s just moved to north Wales (she won’t reveal if she has a partner). “I prefer the peace of nature,” she says. She’d like to own more businesses “in the glamour industry”.
Michal Herba was recently released for good behaviour, his sentence having been reduced to five years on appeal. He’s now living with his mother in Poland. Lukasz’s sentence was similarly reduced and Ayling has heard he may be released soon. As convicted criminals, neither can return to the UK. “Their punishment wasn’t long enough,” she says.
As ever, she doesn’t seem hugely perturbed. “One of two things can happen to you after something like this: you can become paranoid and crazy or you can think, ‘Wow, if I can get out of that, I can get out of anything.’ That’s me. Mainly, I feel invincible.”
Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story is available to stream on TVNZ+
Written by: Julia Llewellyn Smith
© The Times of London
New York Times: These charismatic cooks are a counter to harder-edge chefs.