![]() ![]() You need to teach her how to be a woman!’”īalan shrugged off the neighbors. She said, ‘Cristina’s got oil on her clothes, she’s got oil in her hair. “I’ll never forget, one called me names, telling me to be a responsible parent. “I got a lot of badmouthing,” said her father, Ion Carstoc, then a mechanic at Romania’s national automotive research center and now retired. That set off some cluck-clucking among the neighbors. “I was fascinated with everything mechanical,” she said. She took engines and motors apart and put them back together again. No dolls.Ĭristina Balan grew up with grease under her fingernails in the Transylvania region of Romania. Given Tesla’s high profile, said Imre Szalai, an arbitration expert at the Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, “this will be a leading case on the topic of arbitration and defamation.” Pliers. Millions of employees in corporate America are asked to sign arbitration contracts, often with little knowledge of what they’re signing away. It raises questions about the limits of the legal practice known as mandatory arbitration, about whether an arbitration agreement can follow an employee for years or even decades after they’ve left a company - which is what Tesla lawyers argue as they attempt to keep the case out of court. (A Los Angeles jury found the diver was not defamed.)īut Balan’s appeals case goes beyond defamation. More than 1,000 lawsuits have been filed against Tesla and Musk, a number of them alleging defamation, including the case in which Musk called a rescue diver who criticized him a “pedo” on Twitter and a “child rapist” in an email to a reporter without offering evidence. “They tell me, ‘We’d like to hire you, but we can’t afford to be on Musk’s blacklist,’” she said. ![]() Balan says her professional reputation suffered damage so severe she can’t find a company willing to hire her. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.ĭefamation is the main claim in Balan’s suit against Tesla - the company accused her of criminal behavior on a popular online news site but provided no evidence to back up the charge. Instead, Balan said, she was forced to resign, an event that launched a six-year legal journey leading to where she is today: about to face off against Tesla - on her own, without an attorney - in the U.S. This is not going to be a meeting with Elon.” She sent Musk an email and asked for a meeting.Ī few days later, the HR manager appeared at her desk and said, “So you want to talk to Elon, right? Well, let’s go.” But as soon as Balan saw the dark room with the plastic drapes, “I knew I should have returned to my desk,” she said. Defective mats have caused crashes in other automakers’ vehicles. She had also been raising concerns about floor mats installed in the then-new Model S that tended to curl up under the pedals, a potential safety hazard. So she was bothered to see what she believed were contracts awarded based on friendships more than quality and price. An automotive engineer at the electric car maker’s Fremont, Calif., assembly plant, she was motivated by Tesla’s save-the-planet mission and wanted it to succeed, she said. ![]()
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