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A South American stylist named Larissa Nery, who has been gaining attention 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 joke.

But then her social media blew up 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. "Then they sent me the video where my face appeared 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 realised it was actually happening."

Nery, who resides in Belo Horizonte, the main urban center of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has not once been to India, says she looked on Google to comprehend what was happening.

What Had Happened

What had occurred was the consequence of a media briefing 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 denied the allegations.

Some time after the press conference, the Chief Electoral Officer of Haryana shared a letter they claimed they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign an declaration with the names of unqualified voters "in order that necessary actions could be initiated". They did not respond to the particular allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of claims of "vote theft" against the election authority 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 duplicates, multiple registrations and invalid addresses. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this reported tampering of the voters' list.

To demonstrate his claims, he showed a series 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 different names and addresses but all with her images.

"What person is this lady? How old is she? She casts ballots 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 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 certainly her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Much younger, but it is me. I am the person in the images."

She explained 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 scared.

"I felt fear. 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 wrong because I do not know the groups involved," she said.

"I couldn't go to work in the morning because I could not even check messages from my clients. Many journalists 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 talked to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is affecting me professionally."

The Camera Artist's Perspective

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery's photo, is also overwhelmed 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 make sense of 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 respond. I'm not going to give someone's name like that. And I hadn't been in contact with this friend in years," he said. "I believed it was a scam. I ignored and reported it."

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

"Individuals were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was awful. I deactivated my Instagram to try to comprehend what was happening. Later I googled and understood what was occurring, 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 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 consent.

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

He has now deleted 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 misused. I got frightened imagining this happening to other people I photographed. I felt violated. A lot of unknown people coming at 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 private.

"When you see people accessing your Twitter, Facebook, personal Instagram, you panic. The first response is to shut everything down and understand later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt violated."

Transformative Circumstances

Neither Ferrero or 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?

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

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