The woman whose face went viral after senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s fresh allegations about voting fraud about the Haryana election has identified herself as a Brazilian hairdresser.
In a widely shared video, the woman, identified as Larissa Nery, says the photograph Gandhi cited at a press conference was taken when she was about 20.
"Guys, they are using an old photo of mine. It's an old photo, okay? I was like 18 or 20 years old. I don't know if it's an election or something about voting... And in India. Ah! They're portraying me as Indian to scam people, guys. What madness! What craziness is this? What world do we live in?" the woman says in the video.
The photo was clicked by Brazilian photographer Matheus Ferrero, based in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte in 2017 and shared it online with her permission.
The photograph, titled 'woman wearing blue denim jacket', was available for free download on stock photography websites such as Unsplash and Pexels.
It has been downloaded over 4 lakh times from these two websites and used in multiple publications.
Gandhi shared the photograph while accusing the Election Commission of India (ECI) of vote fraud. Thousands of kilometres away, Ferrero was caught in the middle of a social media storm.
Brazilian fact-checking outlet Aos Fatos contacted both Larissa and Ferrero. Larissa clarified she is not a professional model and had posed to help a friend; Ferrero later asked her permission to upload the photo to free stock sites, which she granted.
Speaking to the outlet, Ferrero said he had to delete his Instagram account after a surge of attention and confusion led many social media users to mistake his name for the woman's. "They literally hacked all my accounts… There were a lot of strange people saying all sorts of things," he said as reported by NDTV.
The row escalated after Gandhi alleged voter fraud in last year’s Haryana election, accusing the Election Commission of facilitating irregularities. Displaying the Brazilian woman’s photo, he claimed it appears 22 times in the voter list for the Rai Assembly seat under different names such as "Seema, Sweety, Saraswati, Rashmi, Vimla" and across 10 different booths.
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