Cristina Balan, a Romanian-born engineer and former top employee at Tesla, has won a key victory in her years-long legal fight against Elon Musk’s company. A panel of appeal judges in California reversed a previous court decision that had upheld an arbitration ruling in favor of Tesla, effectively allowing Balan to relaunch her defamation case, according to BBC.

Balan, who once had her initials engraved on the batteries of Tesla’s Model S vehicles, lost her job in 2014 after raising concerns about a potential safety issue involving car brakes. She later brought a defamation lawsuit against Tesla after the company accused her of embezzlement - claims she has consistently denied.

“I want to clear my name,” Balan told the BBC last year. Now, she wants to face Musk and Tesla in open court.

“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," she said, as quoted by the British publication.

In addition to her legal battle, Cristina Balan has been fighting a personal one, as she revealed last year that she is in remission from stage-3B breast cancer.

Cristina Balan graduated from the Transilvania University of Brașov in 2002. Before working at Tesla, she was an engineer at Boeing for three years, at Meridian Lightweight Technologies for two years, and at Honeywell Process Solutions for one year and seven months, according to Ziarul Financiar. In California, she worked at Tesla for four years, from 2010 to...

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