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A Brazilian hairdresser named Larissa Nery, who has been gaining attention in India this week after her photograph was displayed over the news in an allegation about reported election fraud, has told that she initially thought it was all a mistake. Or a prank.

But then her social media exploded with activity and people started tagging her on Instagram.

"Initially it was a few random messages. I thought they were confusing me for someone else," she said. "Later they sent me the video where my face was shown on a big screen. I thought it was artificial intelligence or some joke. But then many people started contacting at the same time and I realised it was real."

Nery, who resides in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has never been to India, says she looked on Google to comprehend what was going on.

What Transpired

What had taken place was the fallout of a press conference by Indian political figure Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday where he accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party BJP and the Election Commission (EC) of engaging in voter fraud in last year's election in Haryana state. The BJP has rejected the claims.

Some time after the media event, the election authority of Haryana shared a letter they said they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign an oath with the names of unqualified voters "in order that necessary actions could be initiated". They did not reply to the specific allegations he made and did not comment on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a number of accusations of "electoral fraud" against the election authority since early August.

In his latest claims, he said his team had looked through the Election Commission's voter list data and found that of the approximately 20 million voters, 2.5 million were problematic registrations - including duplicates, multiple registrations and incorrect locations. He attributed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this alleged tampering of the voters' list.

To prove his claims, he showed a series of slides on a big screen. One of them showed Gandhi positioned in front of a large image of Nery, while another showed a compilation of 22 voters with various names and addresses but all with her photos.

"Who is this woman? How old is she? She casts ballots 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi stated.

He explained that a solitary stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used multiple times across multiple voter entries under different names. He described Nery as a model who had appeared on the voters' list under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.

The Reality Behind the Image

The 29-year-old verified that it was indeed her in the photograph. "Yes. It is me. Considerably younger, but it is me. I am the person in the images."

She clarified that she was a stylist and not a model and that the photo was taken in March 2017 when she was 21, just outside her home. The photographer, she said, "thought I was pretty and asked to photograph of me".

Now years later, all the attention in the past two days from "individuals from India, many of them reporters", has left her scared.

"I became scared. I cannot determine if it is risky for me or if speaking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is right or wrong because I do not know the groups involved," she expressed.

"I couldn't go to work in the morning because I could not even see messages from my clients. Many reporters were contacting me. They found the number of the place where I work.

"I had to remove the salon name from my profile because they were bothering my workplace. My boss even spoke to me. Some people treat it like a meme, but it is affecting me in my career."

The Photographer's Viewpoint

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery's photo, is also overwhelmed by the sudden attention. Until not long ago, he says India meant only Caminho das Índias - the 2009 Brazilian television series - to him.

He's still trying to understand the events of the last few days in a country thousands of miles away.

Some people had reached out to him from India a week back, asking him who the woman in the photo was, he explained.

"I didn't reply. I'm not going to provide someone's name like that. And I hadn't been in contact with this friend in years," he explained. "I thought it was a scam. I blocked and flagged it."

But since Gandhi's press conference, "things have escalated dramatically".

"People were contacting me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I disabled my Instagram to try to understand what was going on. Later I searched online and realised what was happening, but at first I had no idea."

Ferrero says some websites put his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "People were making memes, like transforming it into a game show joke. It's absurd."

In 2017, Ferrero was just beginning his career as a photographer when he invited Nery, who he knew, to come out for a photoshoot. Ferrero said he shared the photos on his Facebook and also posted them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her permission.

"The photo blew up… reached around 57 million impressions," he stated.

He has now removed the link from his Unsplash account but he provided screenshots taken earlier that showed other photos of Nery from the same session.

"I removed them out of concern, because the photos were being improperly used. I got scared imagining this occurring to other people I shot. I felt violated. A lot of random people coming at me. You think 'Did I do something wrong?' But I didn't. The website was open and I uploaded like millions of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos private.

"When you see people entering your Twitter, Facebook, private Instagram, you panic. The first response is to close all accounts and understand later. Some people thought it was funny, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded."

Transformative Circumstances

Not one of Ferrero nor Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that occurred at the far side of the world could turn their lives upside down.

When asked if all this contributed to reveal electoral fraud, would that be beneficial?

"Yes, I think that would be positive. But I don't truly know the specifics," he responded.

Nery who has never left the country says: "This is distant from my everyday life. I do not even pay attention to elections in Brazil, let alone in a different country."