After enduring weeks of intense cyberbullying, the former mysterious face of the Affordable Health Care Act's website, a woman named Adriana who has chosen to keep her last name private, has spoken out to ABC News for the first time.
The married mother of one is in fact not a U.S. citizen, as many have speculated, but a citizen of Colombia and permanent U.S. resident, and recently told ABC News that she never intended to become the subject of public scrutiny. The smiling photo of her that showed up on the website when it launched on Oct. 1 was originally intended to be part of a series of family portraits.
Since October, Adriana's face has become the topic of late-night jokes, mockery, partisan hatred and widespread Photoshopping, earning her the nickname the "Mona Lisa of health care."
"I'm here to stand up for myself and defend myself and let people know the truth," Adriana said to journalist Amy Robach in her first interview. "They have nothing else to do but hide behind the computer. They're cyberbullying."
According to Adriana, someone from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency responsible for the Affordable Care Act's rollout, emailed her over the summer about the family photos she had agreed to have taken for free in exchange for allowing them to be used to market the new health care reform laws. The representation informed Adriana that her picture had been chosen for healthcare.gov's main page, but Adruaba did not anticipate that she would become the face of the glitchy website and inadvertently associated with all of its issues.
"I mean, I don't know why people should hate me because it's just a photo. I didn't design the website. I didn't make it fail, so I don't think they should have any reasons to hate me," Adriana told Robach.
Adriana currently lives in Maryland with her husband of six-and-a-half-years, who is a U.S. citizen, and their 21-month-old son. She has legally lived in the U.S. for six years, is a permanent resident and is currently applying for U.S. citizenship. While she is eligible for healthcare through the Affordable Care Act, Adriana says she has not yet signed up for it and is neutral on the subject of the Affordable Care Act, or what has come to be known as Obamacare.
"Like I said it was shocking. It was upsetting. It was sad. We were having a hard day when we read all this," she told Robach. "And in a way, I'm glad that my son is not old enough to understand, because you know whatever happens to you, it hurts them too." When her photo was removed from the website about two weeks ago and replaced with icons, Adriana said that she felt relief.
"They took the picture down," she said. "I wanted the picture down, and they wanted the picture down. I don't think anybody wanted to focus on the picture."
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, however, told ABC News that Adriana's picture was not removed upon her request.
"The individuals in the images that we used for the launch of the website redesign in June and through the beginning of open enrollment signed standard releases and understood how their images would be used," said the HHS spokesperson. "We transitioned to new graphics because we believe they provide a better way to visually reinforce key information to users about options for applying at this point in time."
Adriana says that she now laughs about the situation and insists that the cyberbullies did not ruin her life.
