Model Chloe Ayling was lured to a fake photo shoot, drugged and kidnapped, ready to be sold as a sex slave... but everyone thought she invented the ordeal. A BBC documentary tonight sheds light on the bizarre story
06:00, 04 Aug 2025Updated 12:26, 04 Aug 2025
In a gripping documentary starting tonight, Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping ( BBC Three, 9pm), victim Chloe speaks out for the first time since her kidnappers were imprisoned. In the summer of 2017, twenty-year-old glamour model Chloe was kidnapped in Italy by an international criminal gang known as Black Death.
Turning up for what she believed to be a photoshoot in Milan, Chloe was grabbed from behind, drugged, and bundled into a bag before being taken to a remote farmhouse and handcuffed to a chest of drawers.
She was told she had six days before being auctioned on the dark web and sold as a sex slave. Despite the terrifying circumstances, Chloe was able to remain calm and convince her captors to let her walk free and into the hands of the local authorities.
But in the immediate aftermath, Chloe became the subject of global media speculation with both the press and public questioning her motives. Were her abductors really part of a sinister sex slavery ring? How did she persuade them to let her go? And why did Chloe seem so unaffected by what she’d been through?
Then, ahead of the court case, as the perpetrators’ own version of events was reported, the public were left questioning whether the crime was in fact a publicity stunt to further Chloe’s modelling career.
Her kidnapper, Lukasz Herba and his brother Michal Herba were subsequently found guilty by an Italian court and jailed. But even though she was vindicated, the rumour mill still swirls.
This is Chloe's first documentary interview since her abductors’ convictions, as she recounts what happened to her, how it changed her life and asks why, eight years later, so many people still don’t believe her. Chloe now wants to challenge any remaining doubters and finally put the past behind her.
Through probing interviews with those involved, the series separates fact from perception and looks at the press coverage of this extraordinary case, the public reaction and asks how a survivor became a suspect. Chloe says: “What is it about me and the story that makes it so hard to believe?”
The three-part series features unseen archive and unheard testimony from those closest to the story, including her former agent, the Italian detectives and British police, and the judge who never doubted Chloe’s account.
Filmed over a year, this is a fascinating series that asks how the survivor of a violent kidnapping could be turned into a suspect.
Chloe says: "I’m delighted BBC Studios are telling my story - not only in my own words, but also through the voices of those directly involved. For years, people have doubted me, often because they don’t understand what really happened - or who I am.
"I think this documentary truly unravels and dives deep into who I am, the events of the kidnapping, as well as the intense media aftermath that tried to define me. I think people will finally see through the headlines."
Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping airs tonight (Aug 4) on BBC Three at 9pm.
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