The details of Chloe Ayling’s story make for bizarre reading. In 2017, the British model was kidnapped from a shoot in Milan and held hostage for a week.
Her fate made headlines, she became a sensation – and yet after her release she was quickly accused of having made the whole thing up in order to gain publicity.
Seven years later, her story has been forgotten (I certainly didn’t know about it and spent an hour reading about her story on Wikipedia, mouth open). In other words, it’s the perfect material for a TV show. And that’s exactly what BBC Three has done, with Ayling’s own blessing.
The six-part series retells the whole affair, skillfully balancing fascination with horror. Our Chloe in this version of events is played by Nadia Parkes, whose Chloe vacillates between bewildered reticence and absolute fear as she tries to deal with the situation she finds herself in.
Chloe is only 20 (now she’s only in her mid-twenties) and when she’s booked for a photo shoot in Milan, she thinks nothing of it – until two masked men attack her as she enters the studio, drug her and stuff her into the trunk of a car. Shortly afterwards, she is driven to a remote farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and tied to a wardrobe. The photo shoot was faked. She has been kidnapped.
It’s a terrifyingly suspenseful film, and Parkes and Julian Swiezewski (who plays Lukasz, one of her captors) pull it off well. Chloe’s attempts to bond with her captor and keep him on her side while simultaneously trying not to sleep with him are nerve-wracking, with Swiezewski teetering on the line between comforting and creepy. And if Chloe’s tactics of absolute submission aren’t for action movies, they’re certainly realistic.
The story doesn’t end with her rescue – it also looks at the impact of the kidnapping on Chloe’s life. And then things take a new turn and become even more interesting. And more depressing.
There are the days of interrogation by the typically unforgiving Italian police, where Chloe’s confused attempts to lie about her kidnappers lay the groundwork for the internet sleuths. There is her infamous appearance on Big Brother, which exposed her to even greater media attention, and the high-profile court case. She’s a model, the argument goes. Didn’t she ask for it?
In this and other scenes, the camera stays very close to Parke’s face, giving her the look of a trapped animal. And while the carefully expressionless face she wears for most of the series doesn’t reveal much about what she’s thinking, it still gives viewers the uncomfortable feeling that her life is being spied on.
And of course there’s that awful interview with Piers Morgan (played here by Robert Glenister) on Good Morning Britain, in which the blame for the whole thing is placed on Chloe herself and she is implied to have made the whole thing up.
She handles the attention with impressive composure. “If I wasn’t a model, do you think people would have the same opinion of me? I don’t think so, no,” she once said to Piers Morgan.
Still, it’s a depressing indictment of the way the tabloid press demonizes young women who don’t fit a certain mold. “She doesn’t look very traumatized,” mutters one reporter as she leaves an interview. It doesn’t seem like much has changed in the years since then – but at least Ayling’s story is finally being told.
“Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story” airs on BBC Three and BBC iPlayer
