If I’m a feminazi for defending Chloe Ayling, then so be it

Last August, I wrote about Chloe Ayling, a model who was lured to Italy with the false promise of a photo shoot and who later claimed to have been kidnapped and drugged during a six-day ordeal.

When she returned to Britain, Ayling was greeted not with sympathy but with barely-concealed suspicion. Her account was pored over for supposed inconsistencies. She was derided for reading a statement outside her home “wearing a tiny pair of hot pants and a cleavage-revealing vest top, beaming at the cameras”.

At the time, I wrote that I was troubled by the sneering and sexist tone of much of the coverage. I suggested that just because Ayling was a model who wanted to be famous, that did not mean she could not also have been the target of a heinous crime. The two were not mutually exclusive. Simply because she didn’t conform to our twisted notion of what a female victim should look or act like, did not mean she was lying to us.

I faced a lot of opposition when I wrote that piece. Online, I was called a “feminazi” and Ayling was accused, once again, of being a publicityseeking hoax artist. One commenter stated that women “make so many allegations up and tell lies. Crying wolf is the term, I believe”.

On Monday, the man who kidnapped Ayling was sentenced to 16 years in prison after an Italian court heard that she was injected with ketamine, stripped, handcuffed, placed in a holdall bag and driven 120 miles in the boot of a car to a remote farmhouse near Turin where she was held captive for six days.

I can only imagine how traumatic that was and how that trauma must have been compounded by being so publicly disbelieved in the days and weeks that followed. I’m glad I stuck up for Ayling when I did. If that makes me a feminazi, then so be it.