Featured Image Credit: chloeayling97/Instagram
Topics: True crime, BBC, Documentaries, Film and TV, Life, UK News
Niamh Shackleton
Topics: True crime, BBC, Documentaries, Film and TV, Life, UK News
Eight years on from her kidnapping, Chloe Ayling is still refuting people's claims that she lied.
In April 2017, Chloe, who was thought to be 19 at the time, went to Paris, France, for a photoshoot booked by her former agent, Phil Green.
She was hired by someone called 'Andre Lazio', but the plans for the shoot were cancelled while Chloe was still in France as a result of the devastating terror attack that unfolded on the Champs-Élysées boulevard that claimed the lives of three police officers.
A couple of months later, Andre approached Phil again to book Chloe for the same shoot but in a different location: Milan, Italy.
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Chloe flew to Italy as planned, and the day after her arrival, she traveled to the location where she was told the photoshoot would take place.
But no such shoot happened, and when Chloe arrived, she was drugged and abducted instead.
The British model was then held hostage for several days, and her captor told her he'd been hired by a criminal organization called 'The Black Death'.
Once Chloe was abducted, her captor — who referred to himself as MD — was supposedly told to auction Chloe off as a sex slave on the dark web.
MD emailed Chloe's agent informing him of this and demanded that he pay $300,000 for her safe return.
Phil rushed to inform the English and Italian police about the ordeal, who were against the clock to try to locate Chloe before the day of the auction. At first, there was cynicism about the kidnapping and whether it was real or not, as some suggested that Chloe had orchestrated it to boost her career — but the police soon discovered that the threat Chloe was facing was very much legitimate.
While the authorities were investigating the matter, Chloe ended up becoming her own savior, something she explains in the new BBC docu-series, Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping.
Chloe recalled a particular moment where 'things changed' with her captor, MD, who police later identified as Łukasz Herba.
She spoke of her calm demeanour during the terrifying ordeal, something she thinks may have worked in her favor.
"I always remained calm," Chloe recounted in her new documentary. "With anything that happens, it's like, so this has happened and what can I do about this? If the answer is nothing and it's out of my control then I have to just accept it."
She went on to say that she believed that panicking in the situation she was in would have only made things 'worse'.
Chloe continued: "In that moment, I knew I needed to rely on myself, and that was when I got the first ever inkling that he liked me in any way.
"I had no clue before. I thought may he liked me as a person because I was not throwing a fit, but this was the first time I thought 'wow, things have changed'."
Chloe shared that her captor tried to kiss her, and while she 'wanted to please him and be nice to him' so she stayed safe, she couldn't quite bring herself to kiss him back.
"I just said, 'I don't really feel up for that right now. I'm not in the right mind set,'" Chloe recounted. She further implied at the time that something could happen between them if she were released.
Chloe continued to play on this until six days after her kidnapping, when she managed to convince her captor to let her go.
On July 17, Łukasz took Chloe to the Milan consulate. While one of the terms of her release was to end any police investigations into her disappearance, the British model told the authorities everything.
Then in June 2018, despite people's suspicions that Chloe lied about the incident for publicity, Łukasz was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 16 years and nine months in prison.
The first episode of Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping debuts on BBC on August 4.