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

But then her online profiles 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 said. "Later they sent me the video where my face was shown on a big screen. I thought it was artificial intelligence or some joke. But then many 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 not once been to India, says she searched on Google to understand what was happening.

What Transpired

What had occurred 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 claims.

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 "in order that necessary actions 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 poll panel 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, bulk voters and incorrect locations. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this alleged 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 large image of Nery, while another showed a compilation of 22 voters with various names and addresses but all with her images.

"Who is this lady? What age is she? She casts ballots 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi stated.

He explained that a single stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used repeatedly across multiple voter entries under different names. He described 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 confirmed that it was indeed her in the photograph. "Yes. 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 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 felt fear. I cannot tell if it is dangerous for me or if speaking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is correct or incorrect 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 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 bothering my workplace. My boss even talked to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is affecting me in my career."

The Camera Artist's Perspective

Matheus Ferrero, who captured 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 reached out 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 thought it was a scam. I blocked and flagged it."

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

"People were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I disabled my Instagram to try to comprehend what was happening. Later I googled and understood what was happening, but at first I had no idea."

Ferrero says some websites placed his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "Individuals were making memes, like transforming 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 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 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 shoot.

"I removed them out of fear, because the photos were being improperly used. I got frightened imagining this occurring 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 platform was open and I posted like countless 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 understand later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt violated."

Transformative Events

Neither Ferrero nor Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that happened at the far side of the world could turn their lives upside down.

When asked if all this helped reveal electoral fraud, would that be positive?

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

Nery who has never left the country says: "This situation is distant from my everyday life. I do not even follow elections in Brazil, much less in another country."