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 ?.
