When 20-year-old model Chloe Ayling boarded a plane to Milan in July 2017, she thought she was traveling for the kind of career opportunity many aspiring models dream of: a glamorous photo shoot in Italy. Instead, she was walking into an ordeal that would leave her not only shaken but fighting to be believed.
Ayling says she was lured to Milan under false pretenses. Upon arriving at what she thought was a studio, she was attacked by two masked men, drugged with ketamine, and bound with handcuffs and tape. Her captors stuffed her into a duffel bag and drove her to a farmhouse near Turin, some 90 miles away. She would spend the next six days in captivity, threatened with being sold online by a group calling itself the “Black Death.”
Ayling was kidnapped by Lukasz Herba, a Polish man who was living in the U.K. at the time. During his trial he claimed that the abduction was a part of a broader scheme orchestrated by Ayling to boost her public profile. Even though the courts rejected this explaination the theory still lingers. Herba was convicted of kidnapping in 2018 and sentenced to nearly 17 years in prison. His sentence was later cut down after an appeal.
His brother, Michal, was also convicted for his role in the plot and served several years before being released in 2022.
From the moment Ayling walked free, skepticism shadowed her story. Italian media reported that she had gone shopping with her captors during her captivity and had opportunities to escape. Critics pointed to her calm demeanor when she returned to the U.K. as evidence that she had exaggerated her ordeal. The unusual circumstances of her release—Herba himself dropping her off at the British consulate in Milan—only fueled the doubts.
But for Ayling, the kidnapping was only the first battle. The second, she has said repeatedly, was convincing the public she was telling the truth. “The media affected me more long-term than the actual kidnapping itself,” she said in a 2024 interview. “I got the closure from the kidnapping from the court, but I never got that closure from the media. People’s last memory is that it was a publicity stunt.”
Ayling’s efforts to reclaim her story now extend to the screen. The six-part BBC series Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story debuted in 2024 with her direct input, dramatizing the kidnapping and the following media firestorm.
The series aims to shift attention back to what Ayling endured, rather than the doubts that swirled afterward. She has said she hopes viewers will learn “a lot of things they didn’t know” about what actually happened inside that farmhouse.
Now 28, Ayling continues to model and has built an online following. She previously wrote a memoir, Kidnapped: The Untold Story of My Abduction, and appeared on Celebrity Big Brother UK in 2018. She also runs an OnlyFans account, an extension of her career that she controls on her own terms.
Her story, however, still provokes debate. Was she an unlucky victim caught in a bizarre crime, or was she complicit in some way, as her kidnappers claimed? The courts gave their answer years ago, but the court of public opinion has never really closed.
For Ayling, the new BBC series is less about reopening the controversy than about reclaiming the narrative. “All these false headlines never got closure,” she said. “This drama can help do that.”
