In 2017, glamour model Chloe Ayling suffered a terrifying ordeal when she was kidnapped by masked men and held in Italy. She made it home to Britain, but her problems didn’t end there as serious doubts were raised about her story.
Ayling said she had been kidnapped in Italy, lured there on the pretence of a photoshoot. She said the captors had injected her with a drug, and that she’d gained consciousness while in a holdall in the boot of a car, in nothing but her underwear.
In an interview on Good Morning Britain in October 2017, Piers Morgan put the doubters’ concerns to her. He pointed out that during her ordeal, she had been spotted by a witness laughing, shopping and holding the hand of one of the alleged kidnappers. Ayling had brushed off the testimony during the 12th hour of her police questioning; Morgan stated that the scene didn’t exactly placate the sceptics.
Partly due to her age – she was just 20 when she was kidnapped – her looks and the nature of her career, large swathes of Britain decided she was attention seeking and that her ordeal was fabricated.
They took issue with peculiar elements of the model’s story, such as the fact that after six days of imprisonment, one of the alleged kidnappers took her to a café in Milan, and then simply dropped her off at the British consulate. “Eventually [the truth] will come out,” Ayling said, confidently, on GMB.
Ayling was vindicated the following year when two men, Lukasz Herba and Michał Herba, were convicted in a Milan court of her kidnapping, both sentenced to 16 years in prison (these sentences were subsequently commuted to 12 years and 1 month and 5 years and 8 months respectively).
Now the BBC is making a series about the horrible event and aftermath, and it has the backing of Ayling: “My six-episode drama series premieres on Wednesday 14th August,” she wrote on her Instagram, where she has 211k followers. In the new show, she’ll be played by British actor Nadia Parkes, best known for her role in The Spanish Princess series.
Here is the true story behind the gripping new series.
Ayling is lured to Italy
Chloe Ayling, a glamour model and young mum from Coulsdon in south London, had been working in the industry for two years when she was told by her agent, Phil Green, that there was a possible job in Paris.
Green had been contacted by an Italian photographer called Andre Lazio (who was in fact 30-year-old Lukasz Herba, a Polish computer programmer who lived in the West Midlands). Lazio wanted to book Ayling for a photoshoot for a motorbike company.
According to Green, who was later dropped by Ayling, he did the background work, checking out the photographer’s past projects as well as the studio address. Fees and accommodation were arranged.
“Everything checked out,” Green said on Good Morning Britain in 2017. “Nothing was flagged up to say anything was suspicious.”
Just before the April shoot, the photographer called Green to explain that the Paris studio had been ransacked – the shoot couldn’t go ahead as planned. According to Green, Lazio then contacted Ayling directly (her number had been sent ahead as part of the Paris shoot preparations). The two briefly met in Paris and Lazio apologised for messing her around, giving Ayling her money for the taxi to the airport.
The photoshoot was rearranged for Milan: “The photographer emailed me a couple of days later to apologise,” Green told the Mirror. “He later booked Chloe again for July 11. We discussed all the details again and he paid up. We even discussed sizes so he could get leathers for her. He sent pictures of his new studio.”
Things seemed to be sorted, and Ayling landed in Milan on July 10, staying at a hotel in the centre of the city. But when the seasoned model, who travelled widely for work, entered the building of the so-called studio on that fateful July day, she instantly knew something was off: “It was when I walked into the studio and there was just silence,” she said in a solo This Morning interview on August 14.
“Normally someone would greet you at the door, close to the door, but I didn’t hear anything. That’s why, when I went to see the door which said studio on it, I went to open it. But before I had the time to quickly process my thoughts, that is exactly when the masked man put his hand round my neck and mouth and nose.”
The kidnapping
Green realised something had gone terribly wrong when he received a phone call from Ayling’s mum Beata on the evening of the 11th. “I’d never spoken to her before. She was worried Chloe hadn’t been in touch. I sent messages to the photographer and called him but got no answer,” he told the Mirror. “I checked with the airline but Chloe hadn’t boarded the flight back to the UK. I then called her but her phone rang out.” Ayling’s mum contacted the police.
The following morning, on July 12, Green received a ransom note via email: “We have Chloe and we are the Black Death Group. Unless you pay money to us by Sunday, she will be put to auction where she may get sold to the Russian mafia.”
The email included the names of three wealthy individuals – businessman Paul Baxendale-Walker (who owned Loaded), investment banker Rory McCarthy, and agent Dave Read – suggesting they could help drum up the requested £270,000. Green said he contacted the British consulate in Milan which sprang into action, saying it would notify the Foreign Office special crimes unit.
Meanwhile, the East Midlands police became involved (Green’s offices are in the region): “They took over all my emails and dealt with all contact with the kidnappers. They controlled everything. They were specially trained in negotiating, very calm, very professional,” he said to the Mirror. According to Green, the police offered the captors £20,000 (McCarthy had said he could pay the sum) and received a photo of Chloe drugged and unconscious, lying on a floor.
But six days later, the police halted their efforts. Ayling had turned up at the British consulate in Milan.
Ayling’s ordeal
When Ayling woke up she was in a holdall in the back of a car. She had been injected with ketamine and had been stripped down to her underwear. Sweating and delirious, she had tape on her mouth and handcuffs on her feet.
“I was trying to shout, and trying to find my way out, but I didn’t know what was happening,” she said on This Morning. “The car was moving and the radio was blaring, so I had to really raise my voice.”
When the car eventually pulled over, Ayling noticed something which she thought indicated her fate: “I saw through the gap that they’d put an empty suitcase... at that point I thought I was going to die because what other reason would they put an empty suitcase, about my size, on top.”
Ayling was taken to a farmhouse in Turin by the masked captors, where she was tied to the furniture. “I started to cry,” she wrote in her book Kidnapped, which was published in 2018. “The enormity of the situation hit me and I couldn’t help it. The tears were for me, my mum, my baby boy. I didn’t know if I would ever see them again.”
Over the following six days, she was subjected to various kinds of mental abuse, as she was told lies about her captors, and her possible fate.
According to Ayling, Herba, who took charge during the ordeal, said he belonged to the Black Death, a trafficking organisation that planned to sell her at an online auction – for the same sum they were asking for in the ransom note. Herba said she might be fed to tigers if her new owners found her boring.
The first of many elaborate tales he allegedly told, Ayling said she had no choice but to believe the man when he explained that he was trying to leave the organisation and needed £270,000 to pacify his bosses.
He also said there were Black Death agents everywhere, so she needn’t try and escape. The reason he, as a more senior Black Death member, was there was because he had heard about her kidnapping via the criminal network, and had realised they had made an error, travelling to be with her from Rome. The Black Death tended to steer clear of selling young mothers, he allegedly said.
The lies, Ayling has said, explain her behaviour. Believing that gang members were everywhere, believing that staying close to Herba was her best chance of survival, Ayling acquiesced to all of his requests. When he asked her to share his bed she said yes: “I’m not going to be, ‘No, I want to stay handcuffed to the furniture.’ I would never object to something he wants me to do in that time,” she said to the Guardian. “Because I didn’t want to upset him or make him angry.”
They went shopping in a village and were caught on CCTV hand in hand. She played along, making Herba feel like there could be something between them. “Obviously, I had no interest,” she said to the Guardian. “But I had to play it as if I did. It was the only thing I had to focus on to get out.”
In the Good Morning Britain interview with Piers Morgan, she said: “No one understands the reasoning. Unless you’ve actually been in my position, and actually went through what I’ve been through. No one can tell me how I should have behaved with a kidnapper. Or, how I should be reacting now.”
Ayling’s escape
With a week approaching, Herba decided to let Ayling go. “He said, ‘Because you’re from the UK and we don’t have an audience in the UK, I need you to promote Black Death. This is one of the conditions of me being able to leave the organisation.’ And I was like, yes, of course,” she told the Guardian.
Ayling also alleged that Herba said she’d need to send him €50,000 in Bitcoin. “I don’t understand anything he did,” she added.
The perplexing, unlikely nature of the whole affair has lent itself to sceptics and cynics: Herba simply drove Ayling to Milan, and the pair ate breakfast together at a café until the British Consulate opened. He planned to leave her and run for it, but ended up taking her to the building, asking Ayling to pretend that he was her only friend in Italy; that she’d borrowed a stranger’s phone and called him.
Police quickly saw holes in the story: they asked her to recite his phone number, if the story was true, which of course she couldn’t.
So began 12 hours of questioning (Ayling ended up staying a total of three weeks in Italy following her escape), in which Ayling didn’t always tell the whole truth. For example, when police asked her about the new clothes she was wearing, she explained Herba had given them to her at the farmhouse. It was partly true, but Herba had bought her the trainers while they were out in the village together.
This minor mistake raised suspicions. “It was the end of the interview. I’d been speaking for 12 hours, and I just wanted to leave,” she told The Guardian. “I thought that would be another whole load of questions, and it would drag on for so much longer. So I just didn’t mention it.” But it was a detail that critics and journalists, such as Morgan, focused on.
The ensuing media storm, and her vindication
Ayling was vindicated in 2018 when Herba, and his brother Michał were extradited to Milan and charged with her abduction – both receiving lengthy sentences.
Speaking to The Guardian, her lawyer Francesco Pesce said: “I am very happy and Chloe is very happy. Chloe should now try and claim damages from the media that gratuitously bashed her story just to get some clicks.”
When Herba was apprehended, Italian police described him as a fantasist: in one 2017 local media report, they said he was a “dangerous person with traces of mythomania” (a pathological tendency to exaggerate or tell lies). Later, while in police questioning, Herba told the police he had leukaemia, and had been forced into the kidnapping by a Romanian gang operating in Birmingham.
“The demands for a ransom were sent from his computer – whether he was operating as part of a group, or made it up, we can’t say,” said a Milan police official at the time. The police also found photographs of a drugged Ayling on Herba’s phone.
But in the pre-trial hearing, in which Ayling gave testimony in the presence of Herba – a curtain hiding him from view – it became clear there was no such thing as the Black Death.
“I hope he serves his full 16 years,” Ayling said to The Guardian in 2018. “Don’t forget they said I could have been killed by the ketamine, or by being locked in the car boot for five hours.”
Large parts of the British public didn’t believe her testimony, examples of which can be found in YouTube video and article comment sections: the line, “For a victim, she dresses provocatively,” found under one interview, is representative.“To have gone through something so bad, and then be doubted was terrible,” Ayling explained on The Wright Stuff in 2018. “And just to have nasty comments after going through something that could have killed me, was just so depressing, and it made me so upset.”
Ayling has gone on to publish a 2018 book, and starred in 2018’s Celebrity Big Brother 22.
In the year following her ordeal she worked non-stop, with interviews and projects around the world – including in the Maldives, Miami and New York – partly, she said, as a distraction. She was interviewed by Dr. Phil, the American TV personality, and became the subject of a 60 Minutes Australia documentary titled “Hostage or mastermind?”.
