New Delhi/São Paulo: The Brazilian ‘model’ whose photograph became the centrepiece of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s latest ‘vote chori’ claim isn’t a model. To answer Gandhi’s question — ‘Yeh kaun hai (who is she?)’ — which he flashed across a giant screen during a live YouTube broadcast on Wednesday, she is Larissa Nery, a hairdresser who owns a salon in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Brazil’s second-largest state, Minas Gerais, and the country’s first planned modern city.
But Nery doesn’t know anyone outside her small circle in the city and has never left Brazil — let alone travelled to India to cast 22 votes in Haryana’s Assembly election last October.
“I think all of this is a comedy,” she told Luiz Fernando Menezes, a senior reporter at the Brazilian news agency Aos Fatos, which collaborated with ThePrint for this story.
On Wednesday, Luiz traced the “mysterious model” making waves in the Indian media and reached out to her for a comment after ThePrint requested the media organisation to collaborate.
“I thought he was a criminal trying to scam me,” she later said of Luiz, “believing” he was a journalist only after the story was published.
Nery later posted an Instagram story for her around 5,400 followers, expressing shock that her image was being used for voting in India.
“They had used my picture as if I were Indian to scam voters. Can you believe it? What kind of madness are we living in?” Nery says in Portuguese in one of several clips she has since posted about the controversy. In another story, she shared a clip from Gandhi’s press conference with the caption in Portuguese: “Guys, how crazy — I’m famous in India as the ‘mysterious Brazilian model’.”
As for the image that put her on millions of Indian smartphone screens and TV channels across the country, it was simply a favour to a friend.
“This photo is very old. I am not even a model. I agreed to take this photo for a [photographer] friend whose whereabouts I don’t even know anymore,” she said, adding that she didn’t know which website her friend first uploaded the image to, but has seen it used “in millions of things” ever since.
Also read: What we know about the Brazilian model Rahul Gandhi found on Haryana voter list
In an earlier story, ThePrint reported that Nery’s image was first uploaded by photographer Matheus Ferrero in 2017 on Unsplash, where it quickly became part of the free-to-use stock image library. Several Indian news websites have since used the photo as a feature image for articles ranging from skincare to the benefits of certain foods.
Ferrero, who lives in the same city as Nery, had to deactivate his Instagram account after Indian users flooded his comments section. He also deleted the portrait image of the woman from his Unsplash profile.
“How could something like this happen? There were a lot of strange people saying all kinds of things. Didn’t they understand it was a photo from a free platform? They literally hacked all my internet accounts. I don’t know what to do to make people stop following my profile,” the photographer told Luiz over a text chat.
He pleaded with Indian internet users to leave him alone, saying he just wanted “peace and quiet”.
“If you could ask them to stop, that would be great, because it borders on harassment toward me and the model,” Ferrero said.
Later, ThePrint contacted Ferrero on X regarding his account, and he confirmed that he had clicked the photo of his friend in 2017 but didn’t like the way it was used on Indian voter slips.
“The whole process is exhausting — even the chaos that this photo caused for me and for everyone involved,” he said.
He also questioned if it was really worth it for independent photographers to publish their photos on these platforms.
“Waking up to an avalanche of comments and lots of people following your Instagram over something you don’t even understand is terrible and frustrating,” he said.