Naomi: 'I'll curb my violent temper'

The model, 36, assured fellow members of the class at a New York school that this time she was going to learn her lesson and admitted there was no excuse for her behaviour.

Campbell is said to have bowed her head and held her chin in her hands as she spoke of the day when she threw a mobile phone at the back of her housekeeper Ana Scolavino's head.

According to the New York Post, she said: "I do honestly feel very sorry. I don't know if people will believe that. I mean I cannot believe I am sitting here.

"And, I have said it before, but this time I truly mean it. I feel sorry and I am really going to learn from my mistakes."

Of the day when she rowed with Miss Scolavino, she said: "I was angry. I was angry all day really, and then it just got to be too much.

"I threw my cell phone at a person, a person who worked for me. I don't know why I did that. I was angry, so angry, but I realise that is not an excuse for what I've done."

The class on Saturday was the first of a two-day course the model was ordered to attend at a court hearing in January and she is also soon to do five days community service.

A judge ordered her to do the course after she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of reckless assault for the attack on her housekeeper, who had to have four stitches.

Campbell had earlier admitted throwing the phone in her swanky Park Avenue apartment in March last year, but claimed she had not intended it to hit Miss Scolavino.

Her plea, a bargain with prosecutors, saw her let off a more serious allegation of second degree assault, which could have led to up to seven years in prison and deportation had she been convicted.

But it is not the first time she has attended anger-management classes - in 2000 she agreed to go to similar classes after admitting attacking her personal assistant Georgina Galanis.

Galanis told a Canadian court the model had hit her with a phone and threatened to throw her out of a moving car in Toronto two years earlier.

Streatham-born Campbell has faced a string of allegations of violence over the years, including two US lawsuits in 2006 alone.