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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 alleged election fraud, has told that she initially thought it was all a mistake. Or a joke.

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

"At first it was a few random messages. I thought they were mistaking me for someone else," she explained. "Then they sent me the video where my face was shown on a big screen. I thought it was AI or some prank. But then lots of people started messaging at the same time and I understood it was actually happening."

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 Had Happened

What had taken place was the consequence 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 press conference, the Chief Electoral Officer of Haryana shared a letter they said they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to endorse an declaration with the names of unqualified voters "in order that necessary actions could be initiated". They did not reply to the particular allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of accusations of "electoral fraud" against the poll panel since early August.

In his latest claims, he said his team had examined the Election Commission's voter list data and found that of the approximately 20 million voters, 2.5 million were problematic registrations - including repeated entries, multiple registrations and invalid addresses. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this reported manipulation of the voters' list.

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

"What person is this woman? How old is she? She votes 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 numerous voter entries under different names. He described Nery as a model who had been listed on the voters' list under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.

The Reality Behind the Photo

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

She clarified that she was a hairdresser 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 "people from India, many of them reporters", has left her frightened.

"I felt fear. I cannot determine if it is dangerous for me or if talking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is right or wrong because I do not know the parties involved," she said.

"I did not go to work in the morning because I could not even see messages from my clients. Many journalists were contacting me. They located 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 talked to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is affecting me professionally."

The Photographer's Viewpoint

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery's photo, is also overwhelmed by the unexpected 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 a great distance away.

Some people had contacted 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 said. "I thought it was a scam. I ignored and flagged it."

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

"Individuals were contacting me on Instagram and Facebook. It was awful. I disabled my Instagram to try to understand what was happening. Later I googled and understood what was happening, but at first I had no idea."

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

In 2017, Ferrero was just starting out as a photographer when he asked Nery, who he knew, to come out for a photo session. Ferrero said he posted the photos on his Facebook and also posted them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her consent.

"The photo became viral… reached around 57 million views," he stated.

He has now deleted the link from his Unsplash account but he shared screenshots taken earlier that showed other photos of Nery from the same shoot.

"I removed them out of concern, because the photos were being misused. I got scared imagining this occurring to other people I shot. I felt invaded. A lot of unknown people coming at me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The platform was accessible and I posted like countless of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos restricted.

"When you see people accessing your Twitter, Facebook, personal Instagram, you become alarmed. 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 Events

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

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

"Certainly, I think that would be positive. But I don't really know the details," he responded.

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