Chloe Ayling's secret life in Snowdonia: Glamour model has settled into a new flat in Welsh seaside town after kidnap hell

Daily Mail​

a day ago

Glamour model Chloe Ayling has found a secret bolthole in Snowdonia as she has rebuilt her life in the aftermath of her dramatic kidnapping, the Daily Mail can reveal.
In 2017, aged only 20, she was lured to a fake modelling assignment in Milan, then grabbed from behind and bundled into a suitcase.
Injected with ketamine and chained to furniture, she was forced to sleep on the floor of a remote farmhouse.
Pictures of Chloe from Coulsdon, south London, lying unconscious in skimpy clothing were sent to her manager, along with a demand for £260,000.
If the ransom wasn't paid within a week, she would be auctioned off as a sex slave. She was also told she risked being fed to tigers when her 'buyers' tired of her.
Although she was eventually released, it has been another ordeal for Chloe to put the pieces of her life back together - largely because many simply didn't believe her appalling story.
She has since found solace in the mountains and lakes of the North Wales wilderness where she can enjoy horse-riding with barely a soul around.
So outlandish was the sequence of events she described – and crucially how odd her unemotional account of the trauma appeared to be – those eight years on, questions still abound about whether she was complicit in the kidnap and it was all an elaborate publicity stunt.
Łukasz Herba, a Polish national from the United Kingdom, was convicted in a Milan court of the kidnapping and sentenced to 16 years and nine months in prison.
This month Chloe had her say on a BBC documentary 'Chloe Ayling: My Unbelievable Kidnapping' and said her undiagnosed condition of autism is partly responsible for her unusual reaction.
'What is it about me and this story that makes it so hard to believe?' she pointedly asked at the opening of each episode of the three-part BBC programme.
The series followed a 2024 BBC dramatisation of the tale, Kidnapped.
But in recent years, Chloe has moved away from the capital to the stunning but remote countryside of Snowdonia, North Wales, where she can indulge her love of horse-riding in the hills surrounding Mount Snowdon.
A neighbour of hers in her house overlooking the Menai Strait to Anglessey told the Mail: 'She arrived more than a year ago and she seems to be quite a solitary figure when she's up here.
'She's polite and respectful and quite reserved. A lot of people here spend the Summer months in the area then leave in the winter. I don't know if she has somewhere else in England – maybe this is just a Summer place for her.
'She's quite distinctive, so people recognised her quite quickly, but as far as I know, no-one's asked her about her awful experience all those years ago.'
A café worker at a nearby marina said he had noticed Chloe walking past regularly.
'She's not easy to miss because she's a gorgeous girl,' he said. 'She always says hello, but I've never really said much more than that to her.'
In the BBC documentary, Chloe spoke about how she was drawn to Snowdonia.
She told the interviewer: 'A couple of years ago I started coming to North Wales. I just fell in love with it.
'I saw a house for sale that I really loved and I just saw a vision of what I could transform it into. And then, spontaneous me decided to buy it.'
Showing the film team around, she said: 'Shall we start with the view? I think this is the best part – being on the water.' She then opened a balcony door onto a stunning scene overlooking the distinctive waters of the Strait beyond.
Asked why she chose the place, she laughed and said 'I'm here because it's such a beautiful place but I also like that no-one knows where I live.'
Ayling's difficulty in expressing emotion was one of the main reasons the media and public viewed her story with scepticism.
'Too happy, too composed, too relaxed,' summed up broadcaster Eamonn Holmes at the time. But in the documentary, she breaks down in tears as she recalls the harrowing details of her abduction.
A man she knew as 'MD' served her a plate of rice cakes while telling her he was an assassin whose favoured method of murder was poisoning: 'No one investigates a heart attack,' he said.
He claimed he worked for an organisation called Black Death and that even if he wanted to release her, there were powerful figures above him who would not allow it.
Ayling's self-assuredness allowed her to survive the ordeal. She calmly spurned Herba's sexual advances, saying she was 'not feeling it' while chained to furniture, but he 'lit up' at discussion of what she might agree to once free.
She reveals she 'started talking to him about the future, to lead him on, and make him want to fight to release me'.
What Ayling was unaware of was that Black Death was not a far-reaching criminal enterprise, but an invention by Herba, and that he had enlisted the assistance of his brother, Michal, in snatching her from the studio.
When Ayling's contacts failed to stump up the $300,000, Herba agreed to release her on condition she said nothing to the police and paid $50,000 within the month. He drove her to the British consulate, posing as a friend she had called upon her release.
Neither of them knew that the officials there had been alerted to her abduction, and Herba was promptly arrested.
Ayling's evidence helped convict him of kidnapping and extortion, with a prison sentence reduced on appeal to just over 11 years.
The BBC series features exclusive interviews with the anonymous UK detective, from the Regional Organised Crime Unit, along with three officers from Milan Police and the judge at her kidnapper's trial: all stand by Ayling's version of events, the judge describing her testimony as 'extremely precise, specifc and detailed'.
Yet, eight years on, suspicion and hostility still stalk Ayling, who says: 'The hate never went away.'
Trolls on social media have continued to post damning remarks such as 'a lying mastermind, dumb but gorgeous'.
'The aftermath definitely affected me more, long-term, than the actual kidnap itself,' she tells the programme. She was forced to stay in Italy for three weeks after her release and taken back to the site of her captivity by police keen to elicit a shaken response from a woman they still doubted.
In the final episode, she is filmed receiving a psychiatric report diagnosing Autism Spectrum Disorder. 'There are difficulties in social interaction, communication and repetition,' it reads.
The diagnosis not only explains her 'lack of expression, no matter how hard I try', but also experiences that date back to childhood: 'My mum would come on school trips,' she recalls, 'because she was worried that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted.'
The case judge, Illio Mannucci Pacini, says in the programme: 'Interpreting the calm demeanour she showed as a sign of the absence of trauma is, I believe, a mistaken mechanism.' Or, as Ayling put it: 'Not everyone has to fit in the same box.'