Chloe Ayling recently shared what her mother said to her just before her abduction.
In 2017, Chloe traveled to Milan, Italy, under the impression that she was scheduled for a photoshoot.
The photographer, identifying as Andre Lazio, had initially hired her for a shoot in Paris, France, several months earlier. However, the appointment was canceled due to the tragic 2017 attack on the Champs-Élysées, where a terror suspect killed three police officers.
Following the cancellation in Paris, Andre reached out to Phil Green, who was Chloe’s agent at the time, to arrange for the photoshoot to be rescheduled in Milan instead.
“I was happy,” Chloe recounted in her new BBC docu-series Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping.
“I was thinking ‘Okay, I get to do this again, [the first trip] wasn’t wasted and I get to go to Milan’,” she elaborated.
However, Chloe’s mother was not supportive of her trip to Italy and ‘really didn’t want [Chloe] to go to Milan’ due to her disapproval of Phil, Chloe’s manager.
Her mother sent Chloe a text message warning her: “I have a bad feeling about this Milan job. Please don’t go.”
Unbeknownst to her mother, this would be one of the last communications before Chloe’s kidnapping.
Upon arriving in Milan, Chloe went to the designated shoot location provided by ‘Andre’, who was later identified as Łukasz Herba.
Once there, she was drugged, put into a bag, and transported to another site. She was held captive for several days, with Łukasz claiming that he had been hired by a criminal group, The Black Death, to abduct her for an auction on the dark web.
Authorities were desperately trying to locate her before the auction, with one investigator recalling in the documentary receiving an email asserting she had been sold.
Despite the dire situation, Chloe maintained her composure; a calm demeanor she feels helped her as panicking could have escalated the situation, especially since it appeared her captor had developed an interest in her.
“In that moment, I knew I needed to rely on myself, and that was when I got the first ever inkling that [Łukasz] liked me in any way,” Chloe shared in her documentary, now available on BBC iPlayer.
“I thought maybe 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’,” she added.
Chloe used this to her advantage and eventually convinced Łukasz to let her go under the pretense that there could be a future between them.
Following her release, Chloe reported the ordeal to the authorities.
Łukasz was ultimately found guilty of kidnapping and has been incarcerated since his 2018 sentencing.