Brazilian woman becomes face of Indian fake voters row

Brazilian hairstylist Larissa Nery, who made headlines in India this week after her photo hit the media in a claim of alleged election fraud, told the BBC she initially thought it was all a mistake. Or a prank.

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 mistaking me for someone else,” she told the BBC. “Then they sent me the video where my face appeared on the big screen. I thought it was artificial intelligence or a joke. But then a lot of people started sending messages at the same time and I realized it was real.”

Nery, who lives in Belo Horizonte, capital of the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and has never been to India, said she did a Google search to figure out what was going on.

What happened was the fallout from a press conference by Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday, during which he accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, the BJP, and the Election Commission (EC) of committing electoral fraud in last year’s elections in Haryana state. The BJP has denied the allegations.

Hours after the press conference, in a post on They have not responded to the specific allegations he made and have not commented on Nery’s case. The BBC has contacted the poll panel for a response.

Gandhi has made a series of accusations of “vote theft” against the election panel since early August.

In his latest statements, he said his team had reviewed the Electoral Commission’s voter roll data and found that out of around 20 million voters, 2.5 million were irregular registrations – including duplicates, bulk voters and invalid addresses. He blamed his party’s defeat in the Haryana elections on this alleged manipulation of the electoral roll.

To prove his point, he showed a number of slides on the big screen. One 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 his photos.

“Who is this lady? How old is she? She votes 22 times in Haryana,” Gandhi said.

He explained that a single archive photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, had been used repeatedly in multiple voter registrations under different names. He described Nery as a role model who was on the electoral roll 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 pictures.”

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 pictures of me.”

Now, years later, all the attention over the past two days from “Indians, including many journalists,” has scared him.

“I was scared. I can’t say if it’s dangerous for me or if talking about it could harm anyone. 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 my clients’ messages. Many journalists were calling me. They found the number of the place where I work.

“I had to remove the salon name from my profile because it was disruptive to my workplace. My boss even talked to me about it. Some people treat it like a meme, but it affects me professionally.”

Matheus Ferrero, who took Nery’s photo, is also upset by the sudden attention. Until recently, he says India only meant to him Caminho das Índias – the Brazilian prime-time show that aired in 2009.

He’s still trying to make sense of the events of the past few days in a country thousands of miles away.

Some people had contacted him from India a week ago, asking who the woman in the photo was, he told the BBC.

“I didn’t answer. I’m not going to give anyone’s name that way. And I hadn’t seen this friend for 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.”

“People were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I deactivated my Instagram to try to figure out what was happening. Later I Googled it and realized what was happening, but at first I had no idea.”

Ferrero says some websites put his photos next to Nery’s without permission. “People were making memes, like a joke on a game show. It’s absurd.”

In 2017, Ferrero was just starting out as a photographer when he invited Nery, who he knew, to come for a photo shoot. 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… reached about 57 million views,” he said.

He has now removed the link from his Unsplash account but he sent us 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 was afraid to imagine this happening to other people I had photographed. I felt invaded. Lots of random people were attacking me. You think, ‘Did I do something wrong?’ But I didn’t. The platform was open and I posted like millions of others.” He also made the original Facebook post with his photos private.

“When you see people entering your personal Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you panic. The first reaction is to close everything and figure it out later. Some found it funny, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded.”

Neither Ferrero nor Nery have ever been to India and are still trying to understand how what happened on the other side of the world could have turned their lives upside down.

We asked Ferrero if all of this helped uncover voter fraud, would that be positive?

“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, let alone in another country.”