She just wanted to go home. Tuesday evening, around 22 p.m., Chiara, who lives "between Italy and France", orders a VTC (transport car with driver) on the Bolt application from Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport, to go to a friend's house in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis). A journey she is used to doing. But this time, it does not go as planned, as the young woman reported in a post widely shared on social networks.
Even before being picked up, a first question from the driver calls out to Chiara. "Are you alone?" he allegedly asked. "I found it strange, but I ended up thinking that maybe it was for a question of space, suitcase," explains the young woman. For safety, she still sends her boyfriend the driver's license plate, his location and a link to follow the road live.
I saw this on Instagram just now, watch out girls! In addition it seems to me that someone had shared this extremely dangerous driver pic.twitter.com/YZRuLqsgF7
— אווה (@_cocolait) May 31, 2023
Once on board, Chiara consults her app and the planned route to her friend's home. Bolt tells her that she has 30 minutes, avoiding traffic jams on the A1 motorway, approaching Saint-Denis. Only, after several minutes of driving, the vehicle is stuck in traffic jams.
"I realize that we are taking a tunnel with huge traffic jams, and when I look on the application, I can not track where I am," says the young woman. "There's the path I should have taken," Bolt said, "and the path we're on. I was in Saint-Denis, it was not at all the planned path. Worried, Chiara remembers the first suspicions about her driver.
"You and I, we're going to stop playing now"
She then tries to get his attention. Her friend, who is waiting for her at her house, calls her. She picks up the phone and says, "I'm in traffic, I'll send you my location." After a long minute drive, he leaves at Porte de la Chapelle and stops. "You and I, we're going to stop playing now. It's okay, you're tampering with the network," he allegedly told her, causing Chiara to be totally incomprehensible.
But it was the words that followed, that terrorized the young woman. When they are facing a stalemate, she allegedly asked him: "Where are you taking me?" To which the driver would have replied, in a very strange voice: "We're going to go see friends". Chiara says she started screaming, asking to come down, while phoning her friend so he could hear what was happening. A well-felt reflex.
A complaint filed, the driver suspended
"He understood that I was on the phone, probably thinking I was with the police. He opened the trunk and the door, I went out, took my suitcase and ran away," Chiara describes. She then took refuge in the lobby of the Novotel Suites Paris Nord hotel, located at the Porte de la Chapelle. It is 23:48 pm when his friend orders another VTC, to drive her from the hotel to Montreuil. She arrives safe and sound at 00:10.
The next day, Chiara took matters into her own hands. She tells her big scare to her 7,600 followers on Instagram. His testimony, taken up on Twitter, quickly went viral. "I just had the fear of my life, I still write trembling," says the young woman.
Chiara's Instagram testimonial went viral. Screenshot/Instagram
Chiara filed a complaint against the driver at the Vincennes police station on Wednesday for "arrest, kidnapping, sequestration or arbitrary detention followed by release before the seventh day". A document that we were able to consult. In addition to her story, she gave the police the driver's photo and license plate, visible on the app. The complaint will be transmitted to the police station of the eighteenth arrondissement, where the young woman was finally filed by the driver Tuesday night.
Contacted by Le Parisien, the Bolt platform claims to have been informed of this case. "Our priority teams are in the process of processing it, an internal team has been opened and the driver is suspended from the platform throughout it," the VTC company assures us.
