Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday sparked a wave of curiosity after alleging that a Brazilian model’s photo was used to commit voter fraud in Haryana.
According to Gandhi, the image had been uploaded from a central server and used in 10 polling booths to cast 22 votes.
Since his press conference, social media users have been on a collective hunt to identify the woman in question – the so-called “mysterious model.” It turns out, she’s not a model at all, reported ThePrint.
Who is Larissa Nery from Brazil
The woman whose image landed in the middle of an Indian political controversy is Larissa Nery, a hairdressing professional from Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil.
She runs a salon in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas Gerais and Brazil’s first planned modern city.
“I think all of this is a comedy,” Nery told Luiz Fernando Menezes, a senior reporter with the Brazilian news outlet Aos Fatos, which collaborated with ThePrint to trace her.
Earlier, HT has reported that Nery took to Instagram, where she has around 5,400 followers, expressing disbelief that her old photograph was being used to “vote in India.”
“This photo is very old. I am not even a model,” she clarified as reported by ThePrint. She added that she posed for the photo to help a photographer friend in need. Nery further claimed that she does not even know the whereabouts of that friend anymore.
The report says that Nery had no idea which website her friend had uploaded the image to, but said she had “seen it used in millions of things” since then.
In an earlier report, HT has said that the image was originally clicked by photographer Matheus Ferrero in 2017 and uploaded to Unsplash – a popular free-to-use photo library. Now, Ferrero has deleted Nery’s portrait from his Unsplash profile.
Ferrero has also reportedly deactivated his Instagram account after being flooded with messages from Indian users.
Larissa reacts to overnight fame
A video of the hairdresser emerged where she can be heard claiming that she is the woman in Rahul Gandhi’s press conference and that the photo in question is an old photo of her, when she was around 20-years-old.
“They are using a photo of mine to run, I don’t know if it’s an election, something where you have to vote. And in India, they are portraying me as an Indian woman to scam others, folks,” Larissa Nery said in the clip.
Clearly stunned by the attention, she added that reporters had started calling her after the controversy surfaced. “Oh my god, how crazy. What madness is this, what world are we living in,” she said in Portugese, adding that a journalist had even contacted the salon where she works.
