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A South American stylist 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 social media exploded with activity and people started mentioning her on Instagram.

"At first it was a few scattered messages. I thought they were confusing me for someone else," she said. "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 lots of people started contacting 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 going on.

The Events That Had Happened

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 rejected the allegations.

Some time 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 declaration with the names of ineligible voters "in order that necessary proceedings could be initiated". They did not respond to the particular allegations he made and did not comment on Nery's case.

Gandhi has made a series of accusations of "vote theft" against the poll panel since early August.

In his latest 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 incorrect locations. He blamed 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 compilation of 22 voters with different names and addresses but all with her photos.

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

He explained that a solitary stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used repeatedly across multiple voter entries under various names. He described Nery as a model who had appeared on the voters' list under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.

The Truth Behind the Image

The 29-year-old verified that it was certainly her in the photograph. "Yes. It is me. Considerably 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 scared.

"I felt fear. I cannot determine if it is risky for me or if talking about it could affect someone there. I do not know who is right or incorrect because I do not know the groups involved," she expressed.

"I did not 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 bothering my workplace. My boss even talked to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is affecting me professionally."

The Camera Artist'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 make sense of 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 respond. I'm not going to give someone's name like that. And I hadn't seen this friend in years," he explained. "I believed it was a scam. I blocked and reported it."

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

"Individuals were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I disabled 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 put 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 invited Nery, who he knew, to come out for a photoshoot. Ferrero said he shared the photos on his Facebook and also uploaded them on Unsplash - a photo website - with her consent.

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

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

"I removed them out of concern, because the photos were being improperly used. I got frightened imagining this occurring to other people I shot. I felt invaded. A lot of random people coming at me. You think 'Did I do something incorrect?' But I didn't. The platform was open and I uploaded 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 invaded."

Transformative Circumstances

Neither Ferrero nor 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 helped uncover electoral fraud, would that be beneficial?

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

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, let alone in a different country."