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A Brazilian hairdresser named Larissa Nery, who has been making headlines in India this week after her photograph was splashed 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 joke. But then many people started contacting at the same time and I realised it was real."

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 going on.

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

Some time after the media event, the election authority of Haryana shared a letter they said they had sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign an oath with the names of unqualified voters "so that necessary actions 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 series of claims of "electoral fraud" 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 invalid addresses. He attributed 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 large image of Nery, while another showed a compilation 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 single stock photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used repeatedly across numerous 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 Photo

The 29-year-old confirmed that it was indeed her in the photograph. "Absolutely. It is me. Considerably 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, "thought I was pretty and asked to take photos 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 dangerous for me or if speaking about it could affect someone there. I do not know who is correct or wrong because I do not know the parties involved," she said.

"I couldn't go to work in the morning because I could not even check messages from my clients. Many reporters 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 disturbing my workplace. My boss even talked to me. Some people consider it a meme, but it is impacting me professionally."

The Camera Artist's Viewpoint

Matheus Ferrero, who captured 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 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 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 reported it."

But since Gandhi's press conference, "the situation have exploded".

"People were contacting 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 put his pictures next to Nery's photo without authorization. "Individuals were making memes, like turning it into a game show joke. It's absurd."

In 2017, Ferrero was just beginning his career as a photographer when he asked Nery, who he knew, to come out for a photo session. 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… achieved around 57 million views," 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 session.

"I deleted them out of fear, because the photos were being improperly used. I got scared imagining this happening to other people I shot. 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 posted like countless of others." He's also now made the original Facebook post with her photos private.

"When you see people entering your Twitter, Facebook, private Instagram, you become alarmed. The first response is to shut everything down and understand later. Some people thought it was amusing, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded."

Transformative Circumstances

Neither Ferrero or 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 asked if all this contributed to reveal 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 not once left the country states: "This is distant from my reality. I do not even follow elections in Brazil, let alone in another country."