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

But then her online profiles blew up and people started tagging her on Instagram.

"Initially 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 AI or some prank. But then lots of people started messaging at the same time and I understood it was actually happening."

Nery, who resides 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 happening.

What Transpired

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 engaging in voter fraud in last year's election in Haryana state. The BJP has rejected the claims.

Hours after the press conference, the Chief Electoral Officer 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 "so that necessary proceedings could be started". They did not respond to the particular allegations he made and did not provide statements on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a number 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 irregular entries - including duplicates, multiple registrations and invalid addresses. He blamed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this alleged tampering of the voters' list.

To demonstrate his claims, he showed a series of slides on a big screen. One of them showed Gandhi positioned 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 images.

"Who is this woman? 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 different names. He described 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 certainly her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Much younger, but it is me. I am the person in the images."

She explained 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 photograph of me".

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

"I became scared. I cannot determine if it is risky for me or if talking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is right or incorrect 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 reporters were calling me. They found the number of the place where I work.

"I needed to delete the salon name from my profile because they were disturbing my workplace. My boss even talked to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is impacting 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 television series - 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 reached out 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 been in contact with this friend in years," he explained. "I thought it was a fraud. I blocked and flagged it."

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

"People were contacting me on Instagram and Facebook. It was awful. I deactivated my Instagram to try to comprehend what was happening. Later I googled 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 permission. "People were making memes, 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 posted them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her permission.

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

He has now deleted the link from his Unsplash account but he shared screenshots taken earlier that showed other photos of Nery from the same session.

"I deleted 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 contacting me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The platform was open and I posted like millions of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos private.

"When you see people accessing your Twitter, Facebook, personal Instagram, you become alarmed. The first reaction is to close all accounts and figure things out later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded."

Life Changing Circumstances

Neither Ferrero or Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that happened at the other end of the world could turn their lives upside down.

When asked if all this contributed to reveal electoral fraud, would that be beneficial?

"Certainly, I think that would be positive. But I don't truly know the specifics," he responded.

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