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A Brazilian hairdresser named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her photograph was displayed over the news in an allegation about alleged election fraud, has told that she at first thought it was all a mistake. 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 confusing 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 AI or some joke. 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 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 happening.

The Events That Had Happened

What had taken place was the consequence of a media briefing by Indian political figure 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 denied the claims.

Hours after the press conference, the Chief Electoral Officer of Haryana shared a letter they said they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to endorse an declaration with the names of unqualified voters "so that necessary proceedings could be initiated". They did not respond to the specific allegations he made and did not provide statements 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 examined 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 invalid addresses. He attributed his party's loss in the Haryana election on this reported tampering of the voters' list.

To demonstrate his claims, he showed a number of slides on a big screen. One of them showed Gandhi positioned in front of a large image of Nery, while another showed a collection of 22 voters with different names and addresses but all with her photos.

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

He explained that a solitary stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used multiple times 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 Photo

The 29-year-old verified 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 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, "found me attractive and asked to take photos of me".

Now years later, all the attention 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 speaking about it could affect someone there. I do not know who is correct or incorrect 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 journalists were contacting 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 impacting me professionally."

The Photographer's Viewpoint

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery's photo, is also overwhelmed by the sudden 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 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 thought it was a fraud. I blocked and flagged it."

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

"People were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was awful. I deactivated my Instagram to try to understand what was going on. Later I googled and realised what was occurring, but at first I had no clue."

Ferrero says some websites placed his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "People were making memes, like transforming it into a game show joke. It's absurd."

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 posted 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 deleted the link from his Unsplash account but he shared screenshots taken earlier that showed other photos of Nery from the same shoot.

"I deleted them out of fear, because the photos were being misused. I got frightened imagining this occurring to other people I shot. I felt violated. A lot of random 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 private.

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

Transformative Circumstances

Not one of Ferrero nor Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that occurred at the far side of the world could dramatically change their lives.

When questioned if all this helped uncover 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 is far from my reality. I do not even pay attention to elections in Brazil, much less in a different country."