“He always made out that he was the one who saved me,” Ayling told The Guardian a year later. “I looked at him like, what would I do without him? He said that if I escaped, not only would I die, he would as well. He was the only person who seemed to care that I would be free.”
Because of Herba’s lies, Ayling found herself unsure of what to believe. All she knew was that she had to convince him she did believe him and even had an interest in him.
“I’d say, ‘In the future, when I’m released,’” she said. “Then he’d get excited about the thought of it, and him being in a happy mood was better for me, because then there’s more chance of him releasing me.” She added, ”Obviously, I had no interest, but I had to play it as if I did. It was the only thing I had to focus on to get out.”
After several days, one of Ayling’s friends offered to pay £20,000 for her release. Six days after her abduction, Herba decided to release her. His plan was to walk into the consulate with Ayling, where she would claim that she had escaped her kidnapper and called Herba, whom she would say was her “only friend in Italy.”
The plan didn’t work. “The police were like, ‘OK, what’s his phone number?’ And I didn’t know it… They obviously knew [I was making it up]. They’re not stupid.”
What happened after Chloe Ayling’s kidnapping?
Ayling’s story about Herba’s kidnapping was called into question when police found CCTV footage of Ayling shopping with Herba and holding his hand. Some people thought the images proved that Ayling and Herba had known each other before the kidnapping and had, as Herba claimed, planned the entire thing together as a publicity stunt.
During the trial, it was revealed that the Black Death didn’t exist and that Herba had planned the kidnapping with his brother. Herba was jailed for 16 years and nine months.
HGL