Model Chloe Ayling Was Lured to Italy and Held for Ransom for Days — Then Was Called a Liar. Inside Her Terrifying Abduction Story

When 20-year-old model Chloe Ayling boarded a flight to Milan in July 2017, she expected to be stepping into a career-changing photo shoot.

Instead, she was drugged, stuffed into a duffel bag, and taken to a remote farmhouse in northern Italy, where her captors threatened to sell her online.

After six days, she was freed — but her ordeal didn’t end there. As the story made international headlines, Ayling was forced to fight a new battle: persuading the public that she had truly been kidnapped and wasn’t staging it for publicity.

Her story is retold in the six-part BBC series Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story, which premiered in 2024. AMC+ began streaming the first two episodes on Aug. 28, 2025, with new episodes released weekly.

“The media affected me more long-term than the actual kidnapping itself,” Ayling said on This Morning in August 2024. “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.”

She added, “All these false headlines never got closure, and I believe this drama can help do that. People will learn a lot of things they didn’t know.”

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Who is Chloe Ayling?

Born in 1997, Ayling grew up in Coulsdon, south London. At the time of her kidnapping, she was building her modeling career and raising her young son with ex-partner Conor Keyes, according to the Daily Mail.

She had signed with Phil Green’s Supermodel Agency and was beginning to secure international work. But in July 2017, when she traveled to Milan for what seemed to be a legitimate photo shoot, her life took an unimaginable turn.

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What happened to Chloe Ayling?

On July 11, 2017, Ayling arrived in Milan expecting a modeling assignment. Instead, two masked men attacked her, drugged her with ketamine, and bound her with handcuffs and tape.

She was shoved into a duffel bag and driven to a farmhouse near Turin, about 90 miles from Milan.

“There was a little hole for me to breathe. I’d been stripped of my clothes. I was just in my bodysuit and my socks,” she told Good Morning Britain in October 2017.

Ayling said her captors were linked to a group called the “Black Death Group,” and that they threatened to auction her online unless she could produce a ransom of $300,000. During her captivity, she was taken out once to a hiking shop and a grocery store, a detail she later omitted when first speaking with police.

Her abduction ended when Lukasz Herba, a 30-year-old Polish national, drove her to the British consulate in Milan. He was arrested the next day.

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How did Chloe Ayling escape?

Ayling didn’t escape — she was released. On day six, Herba abandoned his original plan of dropping her off away from security cameras and instead accompanied her to a café next to the consulate.

“He didn’t want to leave me on my own, so we went to the cafe next door [to the consulate],” Ayling later explained. “I can see why people think it’s weird. In my eyes, he was the guy who saved me.”

When the consulate opened, she walked in and reported the kidnapping, with Herba by her side posing as her “friend.”

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Who kidnapped Chloe Ayling?

Ayling was lured to Milan by Herba, who pretended to arrange a legitimate photo shoot. His brother, Michal Herba, was also involved in organizing the abduction.

Herba admitted to being the main kidnapper but claimed the crime was staged with Ayling’s cooperation to help her financially after becoming a mother.

“I never harmed her or acted violently,” he said in court, according to 10 WBNS. “If she ever felt pressured by my words, I regret that — but it was nothing like the way Chloe has described.”

He added, “I was in love with her, and I believed that once her fame grew, she would return my feelings and we could share the money.”

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Where is Lukasz Herba now?

Herba was arrested on July 18, 2017, the day after he left Ayling at the British consulate, according to NBC News. His brother Michal was arrested in the U.K. a month later and extradited to Italy.

In June 2018, Herba was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 16 years and nine months in prison. His sentence was later reduced on appeal, according to the BBC.

Michal was sentenced to 16 years and eight months but had his sentence reduced to five years and eight months. He was released quietly in 2022, reported the Daily Mail.

“I think he should have been in prison for a lot longer,” Ayling told the BBC in 2024. “The fact that they still don’t take accountability and still want to make lies and not be responsible for what they did [is] even more annoying.”

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Is Chloe Ayling’s story true?

While Ayling’s kidnapping resulted in convictions, skepticism has surrounded her account from the beginning.

Some critics questioned why she went shopping with her captors, or why she didn’t try to escape when left alone. Others pointed to her calm demeanor when she returned to the U.K.

“I was in Italy for three weeks before I came home to the U.K.. What people didn’t witness was me crying almost every day, being too paranoid to leave my room, and having nightmares,” she told This Morning in August 2017.

The claim that her captors were part of the so-called “Black Death Group” was also proven false, which added to doubts.

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Where is Chloe Ayling now?

Today, Ayling continues modeling and also runs an OnlyFans account, as seen on her Instagram. She published a memoir, Kidnapped: The Untold Story of My Abduction, in 2018 and later appeared on Celebrity Big Brother UK (season 22).

She also worked closely with producers on Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story, which premiered in 2024 and began streaming on AMC+ in August 2025.