A Tesla whistleblower was allegedly threatened with the deportation of her entire engineering staff after she tried to prevent a massive safety recall.

Engineer Cristina Balan said she was forced to resign from her position in 2014 after trying to bring a major braking system flaw in the Model S to Elon Musk’s attention.

Instead of getting a one-on-one with the Tesla CEO, Balan claimed Tesla’s lawyers threatened to deport all the members of her team, who were waiting on green card applications at the time, if she did not comply.

The alleged incident stemmed from the Romanian-born engineer discovering that the car’s floor mats could potentially hinder a driver’s ability to brake.

After Balan’s resignation, Tesla released a statement in 2017 claiming that she had stolen company resources to work on a personal project.

This pushed the whistleblower to sue the company for defamation, even while battling cancer over the last decade.

Although Tesla got that case thrown out, an appeals court has just ruled in Balan’s favor, finding that the previous court did not have the authority to rule against Balan. 

Now, the engineer hopes this major legal win will lead to a public court battle that the former car designer claims will reveal Elon Musk as being ‘pure evil.’

‘We are hoping we will start a new lawsuit and we will have the chance to take on Elon Musk in front of a jury and judge,’ Balan told BBC News after the ruling last week.

Cristina Balan has won a legal appeal against Elon Musk’s Tesla, setting the stage for the whistleblower to have her case heard in open court

Balan accused Tesla of defaming her after she requested to speak with CEO Elon Musk about a braking issue with the Model S

DailyMail.com has reached out to Tesla for comment.

Balan was a senior engineer of Tesla’s interior systems before her resignation. Her work was so instrumental to the production of the Model S that her initials were even engraved on many of the engines.

However, Balan said in a recent interview she had spoken to Tesla executives who acknowledged that the company’s brake issues could be as devastating as the problems Toyota faced in 2009, which led to millions of recalled vehicles.

The decision by the US Court of Appeals allowing Balan to take her defamation case back to court could change corporate policy nationwide, by cracking down on the alleged overuse of non-public hearings by companies looking to keep embarrassing court details a secret during labor disputes.

The engineer also claimed in an interview with The Times UK that Musk has language in all his company’s contracts, preventing workers from exercising their rights to free speech or having a lawsuit decided by a jury. 

‘I won my freedom of speech back, voided all the confidentiality clauses he had on me, and made Musk LOSE his first appeal EVER in front of not one, but three appeal judges,’ Balan added in a post on her LinkedIn page.

According to the whistleblower, who was fighting Tesla in court while receiving treatment for Stage 3 breast cancer, she was simply following Musk’s own directive that he sent out in a 2013 email. 

‘Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company,’ Musk wrote in the email, which Tesla confirmed was sent to all its employees.

‘You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens,’ the Tesla CEO continued.

Despite the company mandate, Balan told the BBC that her managers at Tesla ignored her concerns about the Model S and eventually became hostile before her forced resignation.

Balan has been fighting Musk and Tesla in court since 2014, winning one lawsuit for wrongful termination and now having her defamation case brought back on appeal

The engineer’s work on the Tesla Model S prompted the company to engrave her initials on the car’s engine

Balan believed that the braking problems with the Model S were so severe that it would lead to a massive safety recall, similar to Toyota’s braking scandal in 2009 and 2010

The 2017 statement alleging that the former Tesla engineer embezzled from the company allegedly ruined Balan’s professional career.

She added that companies did not want to hire her over fears they’d end up on Musk’s ‘blacklist.’

Although Balan would win a wrongful termination case against Tesla in 2014, her defamation lawsuit was pushed into arbitration and eventually thrown out of court.

The whistleblower said that companies regularly get cases moved into forced arbitration, which are private hearings, using a clause in the employee’s contract to keep the details of the case from becoming public.

Stanford professor Anat Admati told the BBC: ‘Tesla is among the many corporations that force employees and customers into opaque arbitration processes and deploy aggressive strategies to retaliate against employees who voice criticism of corporate practices.’

While Musk has said he is a ‘free speech absolutist,’ Balan told The Times UK that the billionaire would threaten or retaliate against workers who tried to fix problems with the electric cars.

Balan said she heard that other employees in Norway and Germany were fired suddenly after voicing concerns with Tesla’s products.

‘He’s pure evil… he’s enjoying hurting people… and you don’t know about them because he’s forcing everybody to give up their freedom of speech and their right to sue,’ Balan said regarding Musk’s corporate tactics.

The new court decision essentially sends Balan’s defamation lawsuit back to square one.

The original arbitrator in the case ruled in favor of Musk and Tesla in 2021, dismissing Balan’s claims due to California’s statute of limitations.

Basically, the judge said too much time had passed since Tesla released their 2017 statement claiming Balan stole from the company to rule in the former employee’s favor.

After their victory, Tesla took the case back to a district court in California to have the arbitrator’s verdict confirmed.

However, Balan appealed the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Three appeals judges sided with her, cancelling the arbitration ruling for Tesla and adding that the district court did not have the jurisdiction to make a ruling in this matter.

Balan told The Times UK she fully intends to go ahead with the new lawsuit, adding that she wants the details about Musk heard in court ‘to prove how vindictive this monster is.’