The driver who accused cantankerous catwalker Naomi Campbell of attacking him apologized to her this afternoon, saying it was a misunderstanding that was “blown out of proportion.”
Miodrag Mejdina said in a statement through his lawyer Earl Ward that he “got angry and overreacted” when he told cops the 39-year-old Campbell had attacked him with a cellphone from the back seat of a car on Tuesday while driving around Midtown.
Mejdina, 27, said he regrets calling the police.
“This whole thing has been blown out of proportion and I apologize to Ms. Campbell for causing that to happen,” he said.
Campbell allegedly kicked the chauffeur after he refused to say whether her Russian oligarch boyfriend, Vlad Doronin — whom Mejdina also drives — was cheating on her, sources said.
When Mejdina tried to call 911, the maniacal mannequin snatched the phone from his hand and allegedly smacked him on the face. He then pulled over at East 58th Street and Second Avenue and summoned a cop, but by the time they returned to the car, Campbell was gone.
Mejdina had already decided not to press charges.
In a statement, Campbell said, “On Tuesday, March 2nd I was accused of unacceptable behavior towards a driver in New York. I have worked very hard on correcting my previous wrongdoings and I will not be held hostage to my past. I try to treat everyone with respect and I am pleased the driver has apologized. I would like to put the last few days behind me and move on.”
Mejdina was the seventh employee to suffer Campbell’s wrath.
There was the assistant Campbell pleaded guilty to beating in Toronto back in 2000.
Three years later, a former assistant sued Campbell for allegedly throwing a phone at her.
The next year, in August, 2004, she was accused of slapping a maid in the face. Then came 2006, a banner year for Campbell’s rage.
In March, she was charged in Manhattan with throwing a phone at maid Ana Solavino. Three months later she was sued by maid Gaby Gibson for another alleged assault. By year’s end another assistant accused her of assault and false imprisonment.
That’s not counting a smattering of assaults against people not in her employ, including a nasty incident at a Heathrow Airport in London two years ago.
Campbell was sentenced to 200 hours of community service for calling a flight-crew member racist and slurring a female cop as a “blond bitch” during a kicking and cursing tirade sparked by some lost luggage.
The cell-phone-versus-maid case brought Campbell much notoriety in the city in 2007.
Campbell admittedly flew into a rage while blaming Scolavino for a pair of missing designer jeans, flinging a jewel-encrusted cellphone her way and striking her in the head.
She was sentenced to two days of apparently futile anger management classes and five days of community service, sweeping up at a city sanitation facility three years ago on the Lower East Side.
With AP