Chloe Ayling, the model who was kidnapped a man intending to sell her on the dark web, continues to refute claims that she made up the entire ordeal for publicity.

Now, eight years on, Ayling has revealed in a new docuseries for the BBC that she had to become her own savior, relying on her guile and wit to do what the police had been unable to – secure her release.

Her harrowing experience played out in 2017 after Chloe – aged 19 – traveled to Paris, France for a photoshoot booked by her then-agent, Phil Green.

She had supposedly been hired by a man named ‘Andre Lazio’, but plans for the shoot were called off at the last minute as a result of the terror attack on the Champs-Élysées boulevard that claimed the lives of three police officers.

Fast forward two months and mystery man ‘Andre’ booked Chloe again for the same shoot. Only this time the shoot was to occur in Milan, Italy.

The teen model flew to Italy as planned, heading to the location she had been given the day after arriving in the country. There, she was drugged and abducted.

Chloe was thereafter held hostage for a number of days, with her captor – who referred to himself as MD – telling her he had been hired by a criminal organization known as ‘The Black Death’. He also informed her he had been told to auction Chloe off as a sex slave on the dark web.

MD would go on to email Phil, Chloe’s agent, demanding that he pay $300,000 for her safe return. Phil immediately went to both the English and Italian authorities, who launched a desperate bid to recover Chloe before the date of the aforementioned auction.

There was some initial doubt as to the legitimacy of the kidnapping claims, but police soon confirmed that Chloe was indeed in danger. Even so, locating her would be no easy task, and with each passing hour the window to finding her grew smaller.

Speaking to the BBC, Chloe explained how she ultimately saved herself, adopting a calm demeanour to better manipulate her captor, MD, who police later identified as Łukasz Herba.

“I always remained calm,” Chloe said in her new documentary. “With anything that happens, it’s like, so this has happened and what can I do about this? If the answer is nothing and it’s out of my control then I have to just accept it.”

She added: “In that moment, I knew I needed to rely on myself, and that was when I got the first ever inkling that he liked me in any way.

“I had no clue before. I thought may 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’.”

The model revealed that Herba tried to kiss her, and while she believed it important to keep him happy, she couldn’t bring herself to kiss him back.

“I just said, ‘I don’t really feel up for that right now. I’m not in the right mind set,’” Chloe recalled, implying at the time that something might happen between them if she were released.

Over the following days she continued to lean into idea that she reciprocated her captor’s feelings, eventually convincing him to let her go.

On July 17, Łukasz released Chloe at the Milan consulate, with the understanding that she would end any police investigations into her disappearance. The British model quickly told the authorities everything.

In June 2018, despite ongoing speculation that Chloe had made up the ordeal to achieve fame and heightened publicity, Łukasz was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to 16 years and nine months in prison.

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