There’s a Romanian engineer in Tesla’s history. Cristina Balan was once called a CAD Fairy for solving really hard engineering issues. She even got her initials on the first Model S battery packs for that. What could be a beautiful story turned into a nasty one after Tesla publicly accused her of wrongdoings. The latest chapter may prove to be beneficial to the engineer. To fully understand what is going on, you’ll have to learn the entire story.
Cristina Balan started working for Tesla in 2010. Her task was to design the Model S battery pack. When she successfully did that, Balan was praised multiple times for her creative thinking and hard work. That all ended when she had to join the interior fittings team. There, the engineer discovered issues with the floor mats and suspected relations with suppliers.
By coincidence, Elon Musk fired a now-famous email message by the same time. It told all employees they should get in touch directly with him if they found anything fishy in the company. Balan believed that and sent Musk a message to share her concerns. It was April 2014.
Instead of meeting the Tesla CEO, Balan was taken into a room. She said that she was forced to resign due to the things she wanted to let Musk know about the company. Apparently, he already knew about them and did not want to change anything. To get her to resign, Tesla would have threatened to deport her teammates with pending green card requests. After that, Balan filed an arbitration against Tesla.
Photo: Cristina Balan
The engineer accused Tesla of misclassification, demotion, retaliation, wrongful termination, and gender discrimination. Tesla lost this arbitration and was ordered to pay more than $320,000 in 2017, apart from legal fees and costs. Balan received all the money.
While the hearings on that arbitration were still happening, the Huffington Post ran her story. After the article was published, Dave Arnold, then Tesla’s PR boss, got in touch with Huffington Post and demanded that it publish Tesla’s version of the facts.
In this version, Tesla accused Balan of working on personal projects inside the company without Tesla’s approval, booking a trip to New York to talk to a supplier for that project with Tesla’s money, selecting suppliers on her own, and recording meetings without consent.
Photo: Cristina Balan
The project was something Doug Field asked Balan to do. She came up with an idea to stop using sun visors by making the windscreen darker in some parts. Field was Tesla’s second person in charge after Musk. He liked the idea so much that he asked her to develop the concept. It was already late for the Model X, but he thought Tesla could use that in other products. Balan still has the emails in which the executive tells her that.
The trip was something Rich Heley told her to take, but she never did it because her direct manager told her not to. Heley was Tesla’s head of manufacturing technology. Balan states that Field was really mad when he heard her manager stop her from traveling and that she should go if he told her to do that. In the end, a ticket was never bought, and she never made the trip.
The only thing Balan admits to having done was record meetings in which she also took part. What would be criminal would be to release these recordings, something she never did. However, Balan feels she should do that to prove some of her points about the company and Elon Musk. This would be one of the reasons for the company to try to avoid regular courts with the arbitration: it would all go immediately public.
Photo: Cristina Balan
In short, Tesla publicly accused Balan of embezzlement and kickback, which ended up preventing her from being hired by any other company. The Romanian engineer then tried to sue Tesla for defamation.
Balan first hired lawyers to represent her but discovered that they had discussed deals with Tesla behind her back. The engineer then decided to represent herself in the arbitration process like a pro se.
The Romanian engineer filed her case in a federal court in Washington in January 2019. Tesla attorneys alleged that, as a former employee, she had to use arbitration to pursue that. The federal judge Marsha J. Pechman did not agree with that and said the defamation aspects of her case would fit a regular court. Tesla appealed to the 9th Circuit and managed to take her case back to arbitration, but without confidentiality to protect whatever emerged from the legal discussion.
Photo: Cristina Balan
As someone trying to clear her name, Balan demanded that Tesla present the evidence it said it had against her. The Romanian engineer asked to see the receipts of the trip to New York, the personal project she was conducting, and the elements that showed she committed embezzlement and kickback, as Tesla said she did. Balan never saw any of that.
Instead of proving its allegations, Tesla tried to dismiss her case. First, it asked the arbitrator to change the law that ruled the arbitration. According to Balan, Tesla agreed with the Washington law multiple times, including in front of the arbitrator in October 2019. Things got tricky when the engineer added Musk to the arbitration and sent her request for evidence production in June 2021.
Tesla’s lawyers then asked the applicable law to change: they wanted it to be the law from California and asked the engineer about it. Balan said the applicable law was that of Washington but that she would agree to change it to the Californian law if they moved forward with the procedure instead of trying to gain time.
Photo: Cristina Balan
Tesla’s attorneys then put together a stipulation saying simply that she agreed with the change. The issue is that the Californian law allowed the lawyers to dismiss the case at that point, which is what they did. Tesla and its fans are now arguing that Balan lost when the issue was not even fully appreciated: it was just artificially ended. She accuses the lawyers of fraudulent inducement. In other words, Balan thinks they have forced her into a legal trap.
Luckily for her, these lawyers’ next move was to try to affirm the arbitration decision at a federal court in San Francisco. As Reuters reported, this will allow Balan to dispute the decision. She already said she would file a motion to vacate the award due to bias and fraud. The engineer promises to take the case to the Supreme Court if need be.
Ironically, the fact that this story is not over is both good and bad for Balan. While she still has a legal chance to clear her name, that also means she may face a few more years in this legal battle. Even for someone so proud of being persistent, it must be tough. If Tesla could prove its allegations, it should just present the pieces of evidence Balan asked herself and end this once and for all. From what we have seen about this case so far, that is very unlikely.
I just found out from Reuters, Not Served By Musk or Tesla’s lawyers,that they desperately filed a petition to confirm the award not even 24 hrs after we receive the award!
I will file a motion to vacate the award due to bias and fraud & I have the facts https://t.co/OqSBPv7DbW
Google News