Brazilian woman becomes face of India fake voters row

Brazilian hairstylist Larissa Neri, who made headlines in India this week after her photo was in the news in allegations of alleged election fraud, told the BBC that she initially thought the whole thing was a mistake. Or a joke.

But then her social media exploded and people started tagging her on Instagram.

She told the BBC: “At first there were some random messages. I thought they thought I was someone else.” “Then they sent me the video in which my face appeared on a big screen. I thought it was artificial intelligence or a joke. But then a lot of people started messaging me at the same time and I realized it was real.”

Neri, who lives in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and has never visited India, says she searched on Google to understand what was happening.

What happened was the fallout from a press conference held by Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday in which he accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and the Election Commission of committing voter fraud in last year’s elections in the state of Haryana. The Bharatiya Janata Party denied these accusations.

Hours after the press conference. In a post on XHaryana’s chief electoral officer shared a letter they said they sent to Gandhi in August asking him to sign an oath with the names of ineligible voters “so that necessary proceedings can be initiated.” They did not respond to the specific allegations he made or comment on Neri’s case. The BBC has contacted the polling committee for a response.

Gandhi did A series of accusations of “stealing votes” Against the poll committee since early August.

In his latest claims, he said his team looked into the Electoral Commission’s voter list data and found that out of nearly 20 million voters, there were 2.5 million irregular entries – including duplicates, a large number of voters, and invalid addresses. He blamed his party’s loss in the Haryana elections on this alleged manipulation of the voter list.

To prove his claims, he showed a number of slides on a large screen. One of these pictures showed Gandhi standing in front of a large picture of Neri, while another showed a group of 22 voters with different names and addresses but all holding her pictures.

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

He explained that one photo of a woman, taken by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, was used repeatedly across multiple voter entries under different names. He described Neri as a model who appeared in the voter list under many names, including Seema, Sweety and Saraswati.

The 29-year-old confirmed to the BBC that it is indeed her who appears in the photo. “Yes. It’s me. Much younger, but it’s me. I’m the one in the pictures.”

She explained that she was a hairdresser, not a model, and that the photo was taken in March 2017 when she was 21 years old, right outside her home. She said that the photographer “thought I was beautiful and asked to take pictures of me.”

Now, years later, all the attention she has received in the past two days from “people from India, many of them journalists,” has made her feel afraid.

“I became afraid. I can’t know if it’s dangerous for me or if talking about it might hurt someone there. I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong because I don’t know the parties involved,” she said.

“I didn’t go to work in the morning because I couldn’t even see the messages from my clients. 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 they were annoying my workplace. My manager even talked to me. Some people treat it like a meme, but it affects me on a professional level.”

Matthews Ferrero, who took Neri’s photo, is also overwhelmed by the sudden interest. Until recently, he said India meant only Caminho das Índias – the Brazilian primetime show in 2009 – to him.

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

He told the BBC that some people contacted him from India a week ago and asked him about the woman who appears in the picture.

He told the BBC: “I didn’t respond. I wouldn’t mention anyone’s name like that. I haven’t seen this friend for years.” “I thought it was a scam. I blocked it and reported it.”

But since Gandhi’s press conference, “things have blown up.”

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

Ferrero says some sites place his photos next to Neri’s without permission. “People were making memes, like turning it into a game show joke. It’s ridiculous.”

In 2017, Ferrero was starting out as a photographer when he invited Neri, who he knew, out to take pictures. Ferrero said he shared the photos on his Facebook page and also posted them on Unsplash – the photo site – with her permission.

He said: “The image exploded…it reached about 57 million views.”

He has now deleted the link from his Unsplash account but sent us previously captured screenshots that showed other photos of Neri from the same photo shoot.

“I deleted them out of fear, because the photos were being misused. I felt scared imagining this happening to other people I photographed. I felt invaded. There were a lot of random people attacking me. You’re like ‘Did I do something wrong?’ But I didn’t. The platform was open and I uploaded like millions of others.” He has now made the original Facebook post with her photos private.

“When you see people accessing your personal Twitter, Facebook and Instagram account, you panic. The first reaction is to close everything and understand later. Some people thought it was funny, like a TV series, but I felt invaded.”

Neither Ferrero nor Neri had visited India before and were 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, would that be positive?

“Yes, I think that would be a positive thing,” he said. “But I don’t really know the details.”

“This is far from my reality,” says Neri, who has never left the country. “I don’t even follow elections in Brazil, let alone another country.”