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A Brazilian hairdresser named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her photograph was displayed over the news in an claim about alleged election fraud, has explained that she initially thought it was all a error. Or a prank.

But then her online profiles blew up and people started tagging her on Instagram.

"Initially it was a few random messages. I thought they were mistaking me for someone else," she explained. "Later 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 realised it was actually happening."

Nery, who resides in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has not once been to India, says she searched on Google to understand what was happening.

The Events That Transpired

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

Some time after the press conference, the election authority of Haryana shared a letter they claimed they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign an oath with the names of ineligible voters "in order that necessary proceedings could be started". They did not reply to the particular allegations he made and did not comment on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of claims of "electoral fraud" 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 irregular entries - including repeated entries, bulk voters 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 positioned 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? What age is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi stated.

He clarified that a solitary stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used repeatedly across numerous voter entries under different names. He referred to Nery as a model who had been listed 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. Much younger, but it is me. I am the individual 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 take photos of me".

Now years later, all the focus in the past two days from "individuals from India, many of them journalists", has left her frightened.

"I became scared. I cannot determine if it is risky for me or if talking about it could affect someone there. I do not know who is correct or incorrect because I do not know the parties involved," she expressed.

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

"I had to remove the salon name from my profile because they were disturbing 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 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 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 explained. "I believed it was a scam. I blocked and reported it."

But since Gandhi's media appearance, "the situation have exploded".

"Individuals were calling 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 clue."

Ferrero says some websites placed 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 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 consent.

"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 shoot.

"I deleted them out of fear, because the photos were being misused. I got scared imagining this happening to other people I photographed. I felt invaded. A lot of random people contacting me. You think 'Did I do something wrong?' But I didn't. The website was accessible and I uploaded like millions of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos restricted.

"When you see people entering your Twitter, Facebook, private Instagram, you become alarmed. The first response is to shut everything down and figure things out 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 comprehend how something that happened at the far side of the world could turn their lives upside down.

When questioned if all this contributed to 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 is distant from my everyday life. I do not even follow elections in Brazil, much less in another country."