Brazilian hairdresser Larissa Nery, who made headlines in India this week after her photo was published in the news of alleged election fraud, told the BBC she initially thought it was all a mistake. Or a joke.
But then her social media blew up and people started tagging her on Instagram.
“At first it was a few random messages. I thought they were confusing me with someone else,” she told the BBC. “Then they sent me a video of my face appearing on the big screen. I thought it was AI or some kind of prank. But then a lot of people started texting at once and I knew it was real.”
Nery, who lives in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and has never been to India, says she Googled it to understand what was going on.
What happened was Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s press conferences on Wednesday, where he accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP and the Election Commission (EC) of voter fraud in last year’s Haryana state elections. The BJP denied the allegations.
Hours after the press conference, in a post on X, Haryana’s chief electoral officer shared a letter they said they sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign an affidavit with the names of ineligible voters “so that the necessary processes can be initiated.” They did not respond to the specific allegations made by him and did not comment on Nery’s case. The BBC has approached the Inquiry Commission for a response.
Gandhi has filed a series of “vote-stealing” allegations with the Election Commission since early August.
In his latest statements, he said his team reviewed data from the Electoral Commission’s electoral roll and found that out of about 20 million voters, 2.5 million had illegal entries, including duplicate, bulk voters and incorrect addresses. He blamed his party’s defeat in the Haryana elections on this alleged electoral roll manipulation.
To prove his point, he showed a series of slides on a large screen. One showed Gandhi standing in front of a large effigy of Nery, while the other showed 22 voters with different names and addresses, but all with her photographs.
“Who is this lady? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana,” Gandhi said.
He explained that one photo of the woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, was reused in several voter posts under different names. He described Nery as a model who appeared on the voters list under many names including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.
The 29-year-old confirmed to the BBC that it was indeed her in the photo. “Yes. It’s me. Much younger, but it’s me. I’m the person in the images.”
She clarified that she is a hairdresser, not a model, and that the photo was taken in 2017. in March, when she was 21 years old, just outside her home. The photographer, she said, “thought I was beautiful and asked me to take a picture.”
Now, a year later, all the attention over the past two days from “people from India, many of them journalists,” has scared her.
“I’m scared. I can’t say if it’s dangerous for me or if talking about it might hurt someone. I don’t know who’s right or wrong because I don’t know the parties involved,” she said.
“I didn’t go to work in the morning because I didn’t even see messages from clients. Many journalists called me, they found the number of the place where I work.
“I had to remove the salon name from my profile because they were interfering with my workplace. My boss even talked to me. Some people treat it as a meme, but it affects me professionally.”
Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery’s photo, is also overwhelmed by the sudden attention. Until recently, he says, India meant only the Caminho das Índias to him – in 2009. Brazilian prime time show.
He is still trying to make sense of the events of the past few days in a country thousands of miles away.
Some people contacted him from India a week ago and asked who the woman in the photo was, he told the BBC.
“I didn’t respond. I’m not going to put someone’s name out like that. And I haven’t seen this friend in years,” he told the BBC. “I thought it was a scam. I blocked and reported it.”
But since Gandhi’s press conference, “things have exploded.”
Gandhi said Nery was included in Haryana’s electoral roll under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati. [Congress Party]
“People were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was scary. I turned off Instagram to try and figure out what was going on. I Googled it later and realized what was going on, but at first I had no idea.”
Ferrero says some websites are putting his photos next to Nery’s without permission. “People were making memes like they were turning it into a game show joke. It’s absurd.
in 2017 Ferrero had just started taking pictures when he invited his acquaintance Nery to a photo session. Ferrero said he shared the photos on his Facebook and also posted them on Unsplash, a photo website, with her consent.
“The photo blew up … reaching about 57 million views,” he said.
He has now deleted the link from his Unsplash account, but sent us earlier screenshots of other photos of Nery from the same shoot.
“I deleted them out of fear because the photos were being misused. I was scared thinking this would happen to other people I photographed. I felt attacked. A lot of random people come up to me. You think, ‘Did I do something wrong?’
“When you see people going to your Twitter, Facebook, personal Instagram, you panic. The first reaction is to close everything and understand later. Some people thought it was funny, like a soap opera, but I felt attacked.”
Neither Ferrero nor Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how something that happened on the other side of the world could turn their lives upside down.
We asked Ferrero if all of this helped expose electoral fraud, or would that be a positive thing?
“Yes, I think it would be positive. But I don’t really know the details,” he said.
Nery, who has never left the country, says: “It’s far from my reality. I don’t even follow elections in Brazil, much less in another country.”