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A Brazilian hairdresser named Larissa Nery, who has been gaining attention in India this week after her photograph was splashed over the news in an claim about reported 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 tagging her on Instagram.

"Initially it was a few random messages. I thought they were mistaking 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 AI or some joke. 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 main urban center of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has never been to India, says she looked on Google to comprehend what was going on.

The Events That Transpired

What had occurred was the consequence of a media briefing by Indian political figure Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday where he alleged 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 claimed they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to endorse an declaration with the names of ineligible voters "in order that necessary actions could be initiated". They did not respond to the particular allegations he made and did not comment on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of claims of "vote theft" against the election authority since early August.

In his most recent 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, bulk voters and incorrect locations. 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 series of slides on a big screen. One of them showed Gandhi standing in front of a large image of Nery, while another showed a collection of 22 voters with different names and addresses but all with her images.

"Who is this lady? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi said.

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

The Reality Behind the Photo

The 29-year-old verified that it was certainly her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Much 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 focus in the past two days from "people from India, many of them journalists", has left her scared.

"I felt fear. I cannot tell if it is dangerous for me or if talking about it could affect 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 check messages from my clients. Many journalists were contacting me. They located the number of the place where I work.

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

The Photographer's Perspective

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery's photo, is also swamped by the unexpected attention. Until recently, 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 contacted to him from India a week back, asking him who the woman in the photo was, he stated.

"I didn't reply. I'm not going to give someone's name like that. And I hadn't seen this friend in years," he said. "I believed it was a fraud. I blocked and reported it."

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

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

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

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

"The photo blew up… reached around 57 million views," he said.

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

"I deleted them out of fear, because the photos were being misused. I got frightened imagining this occurring to other people I photographed. I felt invaded. A lot of unknown people contacting 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 accessing your Twitter, Facebook, private Instagram, you become alarmed. The first reaction is to close all accounts and figure things out later. Some people thought it was funny, like a soap opera, but I felt violated."

Transformative Events

Neither Ferrero or Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to comprehend 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 positive?

"Certainly, I think that would be good. But I don't truly know the details," he said.

Nery who has not once left the country says: "This situation is distant from my reality. I do not even pay attention to elections in Brazil, much less in a different country."