The details of Chloe Ayling’s story make for bizarre reading. In 2017, the British page three model was kidnapped from a shoot in Milan and held hostage for a week.
Her plight made headlines, she became a sensation – and yet, when she was released, she quickly faced accusations that she’d made the entire thing up for the publicity.
Seven years later, her story has faded into obscurity (I certainly knew nothing about it and spent an open-mouthed hour reading about her story on Wikipedia). It’s perfect fodder, in other words, for a TV show. Which is exactly what BBC Three has done, with the blessing of Ayling herself.
Its six-part series is a retelling of the whole affair, which expertly toes the line between fascinating and horrifying. Our Chloe in this version of events is played by Nadia Parkes, whose Chloe veers from confused reticence to absolute terror as she tries to navigate the situation she’s found herself in.
Chloe is just 20 (today, she’s still only in her mid twenties), and when she’s booked for a shoot in Milan she thinks nothing of it – until two masked men descend on her as she enters the studio, drug her and stuff her into the trunk of a car. Soon, she’s been driven to a remote farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and handcuffed to a wardrobe. The shoot was faked. She’s been kidnapped.
It’s horrendously tense stuff, and Parkes and Julian Swiezewski (who plays Lukasz, one of her kidnappers) sell it well. Chloe’s attempts to bond with her captor and keep him onside while trying to avoid sleeping with him are nail-biting, while Swiezewski hovers on the line between reassuring and sinister. And if Chloe’s tactic of absolute compliance isn’t the stuff of action movies, it’s certainly realistic.
The story doesn’t end when she’s rescued – it goes onto explore the ramifications of the kidnapping on Chloe’s life, which is when things take a turn and become even more interesting. And depressing.
There are the days of interviews with the characteristically unforgiving Italian police, in Chloe’s confused attempts to lie about her kidnappers lay the groundwork for the internet sleuths. There’s her infamous stint on Big Brother, which opens her up to even more media scrutiny, and the much publicised court case. She’s a model, the argument goes. Wasn’t she asking for it?
The camera lingers up close on Parkes’ face in this and other scenes, giving her the look of a trapped animal. And if the carefully blank face she wears for most of the series doesn’t give much of a clue as to what she’s thinking, it still gives viewers the uncomfortable feeling of spying on her life.
And of course, there’s that awful interview with Piers Morgan (here played by Robert Glenister) on Good Morning Britain that turns the blame for the entire thing back on Chloe herself and insinuates she made the entire thing up.
She handles the attention with impressive aplomb. “If I was not a model, do you think people would have the same opinions of me? I don’t think so, no,” she tells Piers Morgan at one point.
But it’s still a depressing indictment of how the tabloid press demonise young women who don’t fit a certain prescribed mould. “She doesn’t look very traumatised,” one reporter mutters as she leaves an interview. It doesn’t feel like much has changed in the years since – but at least Ayling’s story is finally being told.
