It started out like any normal work trip for Chloe Ayling. In 2017, aged 20 and working as a model, she’d flown to Milan for a seemingly legitimate photoshoot. But it quickly turned into a nightmare when she was attacked by two men in balaclavas and injected with the tranquiliser Ketamine.
‘It happened really quickly. I was struggling to breathe because the glove was over my nose, so my main focus at that point was trying to get it down off my nose,’ she tells Grazia.
This was the start of her harrowing ordeal, which is now being told in a six-part BBC drama, Kidnapped. It follows her experience of being transported 120 miles from Milan to a remote farmhouse in Turin in a car boot. Her kidnapper, 30-year-old Lukasz Herba, told her he belonged to an organisation of traffickers called Black Death and that she would be sold as a sex slave unless a €300,000 (£230,000) ransom was paid. But after being held captive for six days, her kidnapper returned her to the British Consulate in Milan.
However, this was not the end of her nightmare. Lukasz and his brother Michal Herba, who was also involved, were immediately arrested and charged by Italian authorities. But their lawyers claimed the incident had been a publicity stunt to further Chloe’s career. Chloe was vilified. Everything from her clothes to her body language were picked apart in the media and online, she was interrogated by Piers Morgan, and questions were raised after she gave a statement in shorts and a tank top in her garden, after she returned from Italy.
‘I was in the outfit I wore on the plane. It was a hot summer's day, and I didn’t think anything of it. I’d just got home, and I was trying to be happy. I didn’t expect it to get such a bad response,’ she says. She believes her job as a model meant people were quick to assume she had done it for publicity. ‘If it was a different profession, I don’t think it would have spiralled like that.’
In 2018, Lukasz was sentenced to 16 years in prison (Michal got a similar sentence). 'At the time, I felt like it was downplayed in the media. That was frustrating, because it was the moment I was waiting for but it was nowhere near the size of the focus on me [had been], and how I was acting,’ she says.
Black Death turned out not to be real - but Chloe had no way of knowing this at the time. She was lambasted after CCTV footage emerged of her holding hands with Lukasz during the kidnapping. ‘I fully believed he was trying to set me free at that point. I started seeing signs of him being attracted to me, so I used that to my advantage to try and improve my chances of getting away,’ she says. She was also criticised for going on Celebrity Big Brother in 2018.
In Kidnapped, Chloe is played by Nadia Parkes, who tells Grazia her job was to 'play out the truth behind her kidnapping media ordeal as authentically' as possible. 'I tried to just stay true to Chloe’s character. I hopefully portrayed that there is no such thing as a 'perfect victim' and that every single person responds to trauma differently. My hope is that people in the future wouldn’t be so quick to judge and turn on women who speak out,' she says.
Georgia Lester, the series writer, said it was always her ambition to tell Chloe's story from her point of view, 'to help an audience understand why she responded the way she did, and reveal what really happened to her.' She continued: 'It was important to expose the intricacies of Lukasz’s trial which were not reported extensively in the press and to vindicate her in the eyes of the public.'
Lester hopes the drama 'encourages us to reflect on how we treat victims, specifically women, and our own preconceptions of what a victim should look like.'
'When she presented herself to the media Chloe wore clothes that made her feel confident and didn’t get emotional because she hates crying in public. She was being her true self, but that didn’t fit in with preconceptions of victimhood and how a traumatised woman should look and behave so, ironically, that made people doubt her,' she says. 'I hope it gives us pause, before we consume tabloid headlines and make snap judgments about people, especially women.'
Seven years on, Chloe still receives online abuse from people doubting her story. She hopes Kidnapped will encourage people to ‘look at the facts’ instead of judging victims.
All episodes of Kidnapped are on BBC iPlayer from 6am on Wednesday 14 August, with episodes airing on BBC Three from 9pm that night.