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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 claim about alleged election fraud, has explained that she initially thought it was all a mistake. Or a prank.

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 explained. "Then 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 many people started contacting at the same time and I realised it was actually happening."

Nery, who lives in Belo Horizonte, the main urban center of southeastern Brazil's Minas Gerais state, and has never been to India, says she looked on Google to comprehend what was going on.

What Transpired

What had occurred was the fallout of a press conference by Indian opposition leader 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 claims.

Some time after the media event, 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 ineligible voters "in order that necessary actions could be started". They did not reply to the specific allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of claims of "electoral fraud" against the poll panel 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 irregular entries - including duplicates, multiple registrations and invalid addresses. He attributed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this alleged tampering of the voters' list.

To prove 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 compilation of 22 voters with various names and addresses but all with her photos.

"Who is this woman? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana," Gandhi said.

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 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 Reality Behind the Photo

The 29-year-old verified that it was certainly her in the photograph. "Yes. 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 "people from India, many of them journalists", has left her scared.

"I felt fear. I cannot determine if it is dangerous for me or if talking about it could harm 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 see messages from my clients. Many reporters were contacting me. They located 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 talked to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is affecting me professionally."

The Photographer's Viewpoint

Matheus Ferrero, who captured Nery's photo, is also swamped by the sudden 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 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 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 media appearance, "the situation have escalated dramatically".

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

Ferrero says some websites put his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "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 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 views," he said.

He has now removed 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 frightened imagining this occurring to other people I photographed. I felt violated. A lot of random people contacting me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The platform was accessible 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 reaction is to shut everything down and figure things out later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded."

Transformative Circumstances

Not one of 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 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 is distant from my everyday life. I do not even pay attention to elections in Brazil, let alone in a different country."