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

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

"Initially it was a few random messages. I thought they were confusing me for someone else," she explained. "Later they sent me the video where my face appeared on a big screen. I thought it was AI or some joke. But then many people started contacting 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 understand what was going on.

What Had Happened

What had taken place was the fallout of a press conference by Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday where he accused 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 sign an declaration with the names of unqualified voters "so that necessary actions could be started". They did not respond to the specific allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of accusations 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 irregular entries - including duplicates, bulk voters and invalid addresses. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this reported manipulation of the voters' list.

To demonstrate 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 different names and addresses but all with her images.

"What person is this lady? What age is she? She votes 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 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 Image

The 29-year-old verified that it was indeed her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Considerably 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 photograph of me".

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

"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 correct or wrong because I do not know the parties involved," she expressed.

"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 had to remove the salon name from my profile because they were bothering my workplace. My boss even spoke to me. Some people treat it like 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 primetime show - 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 stated.

"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 ignored and reported it."

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

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

Ferrero says some websites put his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "People 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 asked 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 became viral… achieved around 57 million impressions," he said.

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 deleted them out of concern, because the photos were being improperly used. I got scared imagining this occurring to other people I photographed. I felt violated. A lot of random people contacting me. You think 'Did I do something wrong?' 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, private Instagram, you panic. The first reaction is to shut everything down and figure things out later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt violated."

Transformative Events

Not one of 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 questioned 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 said.

Nery who has never left the country says: "This situation is far from my everyday life. I do not even pay attention to elections in Brazil, let alone in another country."