What would you do? How would you react, in this extraordinary situation? That question underpins all drama to an extent but is particularly crucial in Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story, a dramatisation of real but disputed events.
Chloe Ayling is a British model who, in 2017, was abducted. She was hired via her agent for a photoshoot in Milan, but when the 20-year-old arrived at the given location, a quiet building in a back street, masked men attacked her, doped her with ketamine and drove her to a remote farmhouse. Six days later she turned up at the British consulate in Milan, having been released despite a ransom demand not having been paid.
What makes the Ayling case worthy of study is what happened next. After remaining in Italy for three weeks while local police investigated, Ayling returned to the UK and began making media appearances, starting by talking to TV reporters in her mother’s front garden. Here, the trouble started: according to various commentators, Ayling was too calm, too upbeat, too eager to pose for press photographers, too sexily dressed. By the time she appeared on Good Morning Britain later in the year, host Piers Morgan was armed with the big gotcha that Ayling’s haters in the tabloids and social media had latched on to: in a police interview, she had given a misleading answer about a detail of the case.
Kidnapped opens with a flash-forward to the Morgan encounter, edited down by scriptwriter Georgia Lester but with Robert Glenister speaking the presenter’s words verbatim. Morgan repeatedly presses home his one and only point (“You LIED!”), and justifies this by observing that Ayling is earning money from interviews and has signed a book deal. She must expect “difficult questions”, he insists, though he shows no interest in the answers. Ayling is maddeningly unforthcoming when the opportunity to explain herself is presented: playing her, Nadia Parkes nails the flat tone and stilted enunciation Ayling displayed when put under pressure by a kind of journalism more interested in winning battles than uncovering truth.
As the interview is broadcast, Lester shows us a viewer casually disbelieving Ayling’s story, having read online that her testimony had been doubted. On her phone after the show, Ayling scrolls through scores of comments branding her a “fake”.
Kidnapped thus captures an unpleasant phenomenon of the digital age: your confident appraisal of a situation you know nothing about can not only be communicated to the world but directly to the person involved. The show also shows us how someone like Ayling is treated on a daily basis, even before her abduction; how men she turns down in a club or resists when they accost her in the street react with aggressive anger. She is a woman men would like to sleep with, then she becomes a public figure. Either way, she is “fair game”.
The six-part drama’s opening double bill, however, spends most of its time on the less interesting half of the tale: the crime itself. This boils down to a two-hander between Parkes and Julian Swiezewski as a man who will ultimately be revealed as Lukasz Herba. In 2018, after the media hubbub had subsided, Herba was convicted of kidnapping and attempted extortion and, as the main culprit in the case, sentenced to more than 16 years in prison – but at the farmhouse, he tells Ayling he is an unwilling foot soldier of a dark web mafia called Black Death. They want to auction her off as a “sex slave”, he claims; he objects to this and can protect her if she does as he says. At first she is handcuffed to a chest of drawers, but Herba soon offers to relax this arrangement if she shares his bed instead.
What would you do? As Ayling tries to express gratitude in order to keep her captor on side, without being boxed into a situation where she has to either have sex with him or risk angering him by rejecting him, a taut psychological battle could develop. But it doesn’t, because Kidnapped is beholden to what really happened – and what really happened is bitty and stupid. Herba’s plan was a bungle from the get-go: much of what he said and did, or at least the picture we have of it from Ayling’s memory and the police evidence, makes little sense. Kidnapped trades on its veracity, but without a criminal mastermind’s psyche to explore the truth here is frustrating. There’s a lot of inert drama to plough through before later episodes focus more rewardingly on Ayling’s time in the public eye.
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Much of her difficulty in explaining herself came from the fact that her true story was convoluted and nonsensical. Ayling couldn’t shape it into a compelling narrative; nor can Kidnapped.