With Chloe Ayling’s glamorous looks and sunny disposition, you wouldn't have guessed she'd suffered any hardship at all. However, in July 2017, she was kidnapped and held hostage in a harrowing six-day ordeal.
When an attractive young woman goes missing, you'd expect mass media coverage with outpourings of sympathy and support – and that's what happened, at first. But as more details about the case emerged, the nation's concern turned to cynicism.
Many accused Chloe of staging the abduction to further her modelling career, something she vehemently denies to this day.
The crime
In July 2017, 20-year-old Chloe Ayling received a telephone call from her agent, Phil Green. Months prior, a man named Andre Lazio had tried to book her for a photoshoot in Paris, but it had fallen through. Now, he wanted to reschedule and fly her to Milan as soon as possible. She was excited – who wouldn't want to work in one of the brightest fashion meccas in the world?
Like many modelling jobs, the photoshoot would take place at a disused warehouse. However, on arrival, Chloe quickly realised something was amiss. In an excerpt from her book, she said, ‘As soon as you go inside, there is [usually] noise and equipment everywhere. I suppose the silence, looking back now, was a clue that all wasn't quite right.’
Instead of being greeted by camera flashes, two men suddenly attacked her, one holding a syringe. In her own words, ‘My head was being held back, another arm pinning me across my neck. Then I saw another masked man rush in front of me with a needle. I tried to fight, but I couldn't.’
Later in court, it transpired that Chloe had been injected with a near-lethal dose of ketamine. Once incapacitated, the two men stuffed Chloe's body into a small bag and drove 120 miles to a remote farmhouse near Turin.
Bad guy or hero?
When she woke up, Chloe met her captor – Lukasz Herba, a Polish national from the United Kingdom. He had used the alias ‘Andre Lazio’ to lure her to Milan, enlisting his brother to help with the kidnapping.
But that's not what he told Chloe. He said he belonged to a gang of Romanian traffickers called the ‘Black Death’, and she was kidnapped by two ‘foot soldiers’. When he found out, he rescued her and brought her to safety. He wasn’t a bad guy, he promised, but a hero.
In order to leave the group and save Chloe, he had to raise €300,000. Otherwise, he'd be forced to stay, and she would be sold as a sex slave on the dark web. It was around this time that her agent received a ransom email. He immediately contacted the authorities in Milan.
Despite their best efforts, the police never made much headway with the missing person case – until Chloe and Herba turned up at the UK consulate together.
The controversy
Why were Chloe and Herba holding hands in CCTV footage? Why did they go shoe shopping? Why didn't she scream for help? These are some of the questions Herba's defence asked in court.
Herba declared the two had fabricated the whole thing to make Chloe famous. Chloe said she had acted out of fear. After all, Herba told her there were ‘Black Death’ agents everywhere, ready to strike if she tried to escape. ‘Him being in a happy mood was better for me’, she countered, ‘because then there [was] more chance of him releasing me.’
Ultimately, the jury decided Chloe was telling the truth. Both Herba and his brother were sentenced to over 16 years in prison, however, these sentences were later reduced to 12 and five years respectively.
The aftermath
Since the ordeal, Chloe has done little to squash the controversy surrounding her case. In her opinion, why should she?
She appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2018, just a year after her ordeal, and released a memoir: Kidnapped - The Untold Story of My Abduction. The BBC will also release a dramatisation of the events later this year, which will certainly provoke a fresh wave of interest in the case.
Whether you think Chloe is hiding the truth or a brave victim who's managed to make the most of a horrific situation, there's no question the event has left its mark. She told reporters shortly after her return, ‘I've been through a terrifying experience [and] feared for my life, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour.’
