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

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 explained. "Then they sent me the video where my face was shown on a big screen. I thought it was AI or some prank. But then many people started messaging at the same time and I understood it was real."

Nery, who lives 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 comprehend what was going on.

What Had Happened

What had taken place was the fallout 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 engaging in voter fraud in last year's election in Haryana state. The BJP has rejected the allegations.

Hours 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 unqualified voters "in order that necessary proceedings could be initiated". They did not reply to the specific allegations he made and did not comment on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a number of claims of "vote theft" against the election authority since early August.

In his most recent 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 incorrect locations. 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 standing 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.

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

He clarified that a single 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 indeed her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Much younger, but it is me. I am the person 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, "found me attractive and asked to photograph 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 tell if it is risky for me or if talking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is right or wrong because I do not know the parties involved," she expressed.

"I couldn't go to work in the morning because I could not even check messages from my clients. Many journalists were calling 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 treat it like a meme, but it is impacting me in my career."

The Photographer's Perspective

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery's photo, is also swamped by the sudden 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 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 explained.

"I didn't reply. I'm not going to provide someone's name like that. And I hadn't seen this friend in years," he said. "I believed it was a scam. I ignored and flagged it."

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

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

Ferrero says some websites placed his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "People 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 asked Nery, who he knew, to come out for a photoshoot. Ferrero said he posted the photos on his Facebook and also posted them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her permission.

"The photo became viral… achieved around 57 million impressions," 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 shoot.

"I removed them out of fear, 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 website was open and I uploaded 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 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 comprehend how something that happened at the far side of the world could turn their lives upside down.

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

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

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