The 39-year-old white woman who made national headlines after she was caught on video Dec. 24 calling an African American couple the n-word while holding a knife at a McMinnville strip mall said Friday she’s not a racist.

Amber Rose Rocco said she had never used the n-word before an African American woman, who was one of the targets of her Christmas Eve tirade, caught it on her cellphone and shared the video with media.

“I do 100 percent from the bottom of my heart regret saying that word,” Rocco said. “I’ve never in my life used that word. I have a very mixed family and I love them. I love everybody equally.”

She said she’ll never use the racial epithet in the future. She yelled it then because she felt threatened, she said.

“I would never use that word ever again,” Rocco said. “It takes a deep amount of rage for anybody to have to say something like that.”

Moments before Rocco spoke to reporters, she appeared in Yamhill County Circuit Court to be arraigned on the charges against her. Rocco has been accused of three felonies and seven misdemeanors, including second-degree intimidation under the state’s hate crime law.

Rocco was arrested Dec. 28 after the African American couple said she spat on the man’s chest, slapped him in the face, held a knife up to him and slammed a car door on the woman’s ankle. They said she also threatened to use the knife, exclaiming “I’ll stab you, I’ll kill you (n-word),” according to new details released in a police report.

Keysuan Goodyear told police the confrontation began after Rocco complained about the parking job of the car he and his girlfriend, Emora Roberson, took to the strip mall along Oregon 99. While Roberson was inside Gandalf’s Smoke & Vape Shop with a relative who had driven the couple there, Goodyear waited in the car.

According to the police report, Goodyear couldn’t make out what Rocco said immediately after she drove up, parked next to them and headed into a nearby Domino’s Pizza, but a bystander told him that Rocco was unhappy about the parking job and called him the n-word.

When Rocco came out of Domino’s, the violent encounter unfolded, Goodyear said.

By then, Roberson also was back at the car. The couple told police that while Roberson was sitting in the front passenger seat with the door open, Rocco tried to slam the door shut on her ankle. On a scale of 0 to 10, Roberson said the pain in her ankle was a 7.

10 Amber Rocco makes court appearance in Yamhill County

Roberson told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the commotion upset her 15-month-old baby, who was in the back of the car and started “crying her head off.”

In the video, Rocco appears to call both Roberson and Goodyear the racial slur. Roberson tells her boyfriend not to retaliate.

“Nah, it’s not worth it, babe,” she says. “We’re in a white-ass town.”

On Friday, Rocco disputed the couple’s version of what happened.

She claimed she didn’t start the dispute and that she said nothing to the couple before she stepped out of Domino’s with some food. She said upon returning to her car, “a gentleman” -- apparently referring to Goodyear -- slapped her. She said she suffered a blood blister behind her ear. She responded by pulling out the knife, she said.

“When I went to defend myself -- and that’s exactly what I did, I defended myself as a human being -- it got blown way out of proportion,” Rocco said.

She said “the weapon that I was holding in my hand was facing backwards.”

Rocco said the only person she had spoken to moments earlier, when she first left her car, was her husband, who was sitting in the passenger seat.

“They freaked out and was accusing me of screaming when it had nothing to do with them in the first place,” Rocco said. “Nothing. They verbally started attacking me.”

Rocco continued: “He was calling me a crackhead and a meth head. I’m like, ‘Really?’”

Rocco said she called 911, but McMinnville police were unhelpful. Then, police questioned her a few days later. She denied wrongdoing, according to the report.

“Ms. Rocco told me she was only defending herself and is not racist at all,” wrote a police officer in the report.

Rocco was booked into Yamhill County Jail on Dec. 29 and was released three days later on Tuesday after posting $4,000 bail, according to jail records.

Rocco lives in Willamina, a town of 2,200 residents about 20 miles southwest of McMinnville.

A grand jury indicted her this week on two counts of unlawful use of a weapon, fourth-degree assault, two counts of second-degree intimidation, two counts of menacing and three counts of harassment.

She is due in court again Jan. 31. No trial date has been set yet.

-- Aimee Green and Beth Nakamura

agreen@oregonian.com

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