“The Chloe Ayling Story” – Series “Kidnapped”: Gunshone Media Crowd

In summer 2017, 20-year-old British Model Chloe Ayling (Nadia Parkes) will be kidnapped in Milan. After a week, she is released again and is exposed to a huge media hype after her kidnapping. After a short time, Chloe Ayling is questioned. It is the claim in the room that she had only faked the kidnapping to give her career a boost. The reasons for this were on the one hand contradictory information about the investigative authorities and on the other hand, representatives of the tabloid journal, Chloe Ayling had been too happy with the media when they returned to London.

The boulevard press literally searched for contradictions and a possible scandal. What really happened back then, during the one-week kidnapping and how Chloe Ayling got into the media crossfire, the six-part BBC series “Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story” tries to tell. The drama series is based on court protocols, interviews and a book published by Chloe Ayling. To date, its history is always questioned, especially in Internet posts. The two perpetrators were sentenced to long prison terms after a sensational process in Italy.

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Chloe Ayling was invited to a fictitious photo shoot in Milan in July 2017. When she entered the supposed agency, she was overwhelmed by two hooded men, she was sprayed ketamine and half anesthetized she was brought to a remote house to Piedmont. There one of the kidnappers named Andi (Julian świeżewski), who had booked her a few months earlier for a shoot in Paris, that she was kidnapped by a mafia organization called “Black Death” to auction her online. But for a ransom of 300,000 euros, she could buy herself free.

Over time, Andi, who is actually called Lukasz Herba, tries to build a relationship of trust with her. Supposedly he wants to save her. But all of this is just the manipulation of a stalker who kidnaps Chloe together with his brother and staged this Mafia story in the hope of being able to build such a relationship with Chloe Ayling. The 20-year-old, completely frightened kidnapping victim plays sympathy to the kidnapper. Allegedly, his organization can also kill members of Chloe’s family if she works with the police authorities, she is still explained before she is released after a week in front of the English embassy in Milan.

Because of the ongoing investigations, Chloe Ayling is not allowed to leave Italy for several weeks. Between anxiety and panic attacks, she tries to process the experiences while the police are interrogating them again and again. It takes time for her to overcome her fear and work with the authorities. This initial hesitation will later be doom when dealing with the British media in search of a scandal history.

The series urgently shows how the massively unsettled Chloe Ayling gets under pressure, while the perpetrator assumes the claim of the media in the course of the court procedure that the kidnapping would not have taken place. At the same time, for the young model, which comes from simple, petty-bourgeois conditions in South London, the media attention that she wants to use is.

In addition, her agent is urged to talk to the press. The boulevardesque media apparatus baits them as well as it afterwards. There is an absurd perpetrator-victim reversal. The young woman finally becomes the projection surface of frustrated men on the Internet and the target for penthes.

In this respect, the series impressively tells of structural violence against women, the immense difficulty to defend themselves against it and how ruthless tabloid media in search of quotas help shape such stories and exercise violence themselves.