It turns out the “Brazilian model” at the heart of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s latest vote chori claim isn’t a model at all. The woman in question, whose photograph flashed across Rahul Gandhi’s giant screen during his live YouTube broadcast, is Larissa Nery.
She’s a hairdresser who owns a small salon in Belo Horizonte, the capital city of southeastern Brazil’s Minas Gerais state and, as fate would have it, the country’s first planned modern city.
To answer Gandhi’s question — who is she? — she’s someone who 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,” Nery told Luiz Fernando Menezes, a senior reporter at a Brazilian news agency, which collaborated with an Indian media outlet to uncover the mystery.
The journalist had tracked down the “mysterious model” making waves in Indian media after the media house requested the outlet’s help. When he first contacted her, Nery wasn’t exactly flattered by the attention.
“I thought he was a criminal trying to scam me,” she was quoted as saying. She believed Luiz was a journalist after the story went live.
Her disbelief didn’t end there. For her 5,400 Instagram followers, Nery posted a series of stories expressing shock that her picture was apparently being used in India’s voting system.
“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?” she said in Portuguese, shaking her head at the surreal turn of events.
In another clip, she shared a snippet from Gandhi’s press conference, adding the caption: “Guys, how crazy — I’m famous in India as the ‘mysterious Brazilian model’.”
The photo that set off the international misunderstanding? A simple favour for 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 explained. She said she had no idea which website her friend first uploaded it to, but she’s seen it pop up “in millions of things” ever since.
The image was first uploaded in 2017 by photographer Matheus Ferrero on the free stock image site Unsplash, where it quickly became part of the public library. Over the years, several Indian websites have used it to illustrate stories ranging from skincare routines to diet tips and now, though more details are awaited, hinting at an election fraud.
Ferrero, who also lives in Belo Horizonte, hadn’t expected his casual portrait to become the star of a political storm halfway across the world. After Indian users flooded his social media with comments, he deactivated his Instagram and deleted the now-famous image from Unsplash.
“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,” Ferrero told Luiz via text.
He appealed directly to Indian internet users: “If you could ask them to stop, that would be great, because it borders on harassment toward me and the model.”
Ferrero confirmed he had taken the photo of his friend in 2017 but said he didn’t like how it had ended up on Indian voter slips.
“The whole process is exhausting — even the chaos that this photo caused for me and for everyone involved,” he said, questioning whether independent photographers should even upload their work to free-use sites anymore.
“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 added.
Also Read: Software, Fake Applications Used For Vote Chori: Rahul Gandhi Makes Strong Claims https://www.vibesofindia.com/software-fake-applications-used-for-vote-chori-rahul-gandhi-makes-strong-claims/
