The Brazilian woman whose face went viral after senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s fresh allegations regarding the Haryana election recently spoke to BBC at length about what most people got wrong about her photograph and the impact of Rahul Gandhi’s press conference on her life.
Larissa Nery, who recently blew up on the internet as the ‘Brazilian model’ at the centre of Rahul Gandhi’s ‘vote chori H-files’ recently clarified through an instagram post that she is not a model but actually works as a hairdresser in Brazil.
Reacting to her new found popularity in India, Nery said that the photograph in question is indeed an old picture of hers from when she was 21 years old. “The photo was taken right outside my home. The photographer thought I was pretty and asked to take photos of me,” she said.
Now years later, all the attention in the past two days from “people from India, many of them journalists” has left the hairdresser perplexed. “I am scared. I cannot tell if it is dangerous for me or if speaking about it could harm someone there. I do not know who is right or wrong because I do not know the parties involved.” Nery told the BBC.
In his latest allegations of vote chori or vote theft in Haryana elections, leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi said that 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 fake and irregular entries including duplicates and falsely registered voters.
To prove his claims, Gandhi displayed a number of slides on a big screen in his latest press conference. One of these slides showed an old big image of Nery, with a list of 22 voters within the backdrop. Where all voters despite having different names and addresses had her image attached to them in the personal identity section.
“Who is this lady? How old is she? She voted 22 times in Haryana,” Gandhi had asked in the press conference,before reporting her as a Brazilian model.
Following Gandhi’s conference, Nery had initially responded to her virality on social media with a video addressing her confusion and infuriation with ongoing affairs. “Guys, they are using an old photo of mine. I was like 18 or 20 years old. I don’t know if it’s an election or something about voting.. in India.They’re portraying me as Indian to scam people, guys. What madness! What world do we live in?” Nery was heard saying in the video.
Nery further unveiled that the photographer, Matheus Ferrero, a friend of hers, had sought her permission to share the image online on Unsplash from where she is guessing it probably got picked up. Unsplash is a free site, people use to download images.
Gandhi’s conference did not only impact Nery but also took Ferrero’s world by strom. Since the congress leader’s press conference, multiple journalists started reaching out to Ferrero and began posting his images alongside Nery on their websites.
“People were calling me on Instagram and Facebook. It was terrible. I deactivated my Instagram to try to understand what was going on. “People were making memes, like turning it into a game show joke. It’s absurd.Later I googled it and realised what was happening, but at first I had no idea.” Ferrero told the BBC.
“When you see people entering your Twitter, Facebook, personal Instagram, you panic. The first reaction is to shut everything down and understand later. Some people thought it was funny, like a soap opera, but I felt invaded,” he added.
When asked if Ferrero will feel better about this if all the ongoing events helped uncover electoral fraud, he responded by saying that it may be positive in that particular case but does not really know much about the ongoing elections
“Yes, I think that would be positive. But I don’t really know the details. This is far from my reality. I do not even follow elections in Brazil, let alone in another country,” he said
