🔗 Share this article

A South American stylist named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her image was splashed over the news in an allegation about alleged election fraud, has told that she at first thought it was all a mistake. Or a joke.

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

"At first it was a few scattered 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 artificial intelligence or some prank. But then lots of people started contacting at the same time and I understood it was real."

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 searched on Google to comprehend what was happening.

What Had Happened

What had taken place 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 committing voter fraud in last year's election in Haryana state. The BJP has denied the allegations.

Hours 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 oath with the names of unqualified voters "so that necessary proceedings could be initiated". They did not reply to the specific allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a number of accusations of "vote theft" 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 repeated entries, multiple registrations and invalid addresses. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this reported tampering 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 large image of Nery, while another showed a compilation of 22 voters with various names and addresses but all with her images.

"What person is this woman? How old is she? She casts ballots 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi said.

He explained that a solitary stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used repeatedly across multiple voter entries under various 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 Truth Behind the Photo

The 29-year-old confirmed that it was certainly her in the photograph. "Yes. It is me. Considerably younger, but it is me. I am the individual 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, "found me attractive 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 dangerous 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 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 found 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 professionally."

The Camera Artist's Viewpoint

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 primetime show - 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 respond. I'm not going to provide someone's name like that. And I hadn't seen this friend in years," he said. "I thought it was a scam. I ignored and reported it."

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

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

Ferrero says some websites placed his pictures next to Nery's photo without permission. "People were creating jokes, like turning 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 consent.

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

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 removed them out of fear, because the photos were being misused. I got frightened imagining this happening to other people I photographed. I felt violated. A lot of random people coming at me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The platform was accessible and I posted like millions 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 figure things out later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt violated."

Life Changing Events

Not one of Ferrero or Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that happened at the far side of the world could dramatically change their lives.

When questioned if all this helped uncover electoral fraud, would that be positive?

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

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