A Tesla whistleblower has branded Elon Musk "pure evil" and wants to face the tech billionaire in open court. Cristina Balan, a former engineer, lost her job after raising a safety concern regarding an alleged design flaw that could affect the cars' braking. On Thursday, a panel of appeal judges in California reversed a previous decision to dismiss her defamation claim against the electric vehicle company.

She opined on told Times Radio: "I started this lawsuit to prove my innocence and to prove how vindictive this monster is. He is pure evil." Balan was once such an instrumental part of the team that her intials were engraved into batteries in the Model S, but after telling Mr Musk that the floor matts were curling underneath some of the pedals in 2014, she was called into a meeting and told to resign.

She claimed that the Tesla CEO told his employees to email him directly if they had any issues, but "90% of those who did got fired soon after".

After finally having her query listened to, Balan was allowed a meeting with the HR and legal departments, who she claimed "forced" her to resign.

She said: "They forced me to resign. They told me that if I'm not resigning on the spot, they will deport my entire team, because the entire Tesla team, the entire interior team was backing me up.

"Tesla's plan and the legal department's plan was to convince the entire team and myself to close the investigation, the internal investigation that we opened in the company to fix a serious safety issue."

Balan said that her concerns regarding the brakes was not the only thing she emailed Mr Musk about, because "we had hundreds of defects per car and we are sending the cars out like that, knowing how many [defects]."

She won a wrongful dismissal case but was publicly accused by Tesla of using its resources for a "secret project", which, if true, could have been considered embezzlement.

Balan, who is now in remission from stage-3B breast cancer, has continuously maintained her innocence and brought a defamation case against the EV company in 2019

The former engineer's claims were previously dismissed until judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in her favour on Thursday.

Any future legal proceedings may need to go through an arbitration process as per a contract she signed while working for Tesla, so it will likely be a while before the possibility of facing Mr Musk in open court arises.