One evening in 1991, struggling filmmaker Billy Bob Thornton spotted his dream girl outside a Hollywood restaurant. "There's not a snowball's chance in hell of me getting your phone number, is there?" he drawled.
"He was charming," says Pietra Thornton, who soon married the Arkansas auteur. They seemed to be a fairy-tale couple at last year's Academy Awards, where Billy Bob won an Oscar for Sling Blade. But, according to Pietra, Thornton had a dark side. She sued for divorce last spring and then, in September, she filed a lawsuit against him, alleging he stalked and assaulted her during their marriage. Billy Bob has rigorously denied her charges. Pietra considers posing for Playboy to be her own declaration of independence. "This is my Oscar," she says.
The Thorntons looked happy at last year's Academy Awards (above). But Pietra feared her husband's reaction. "When Billy Bob didn't win Best Actor, I knew he wouldn't be fun to be with."
"As a feminist, I worry that other feminists will think that my being naked in Playboy is wrong," Pietra told us. "But here's how I see it: My marriage was a prison. Billy Bob was so jealous that he made me breast-feed our two sons until they were two and three years old--just to keep me at home and to stop other men from looking at me. He said that I was his angel, but he was hardly an angel to me."
"I saw on TV that Billy Bob was with Laura Dern. I'm not with anyone. A marriage like mine can numb you. Sometimes I feel 100 years old. But I'm only 27." Pietra says her primary reason for posing was political--"I want people to notice me and hear my message: Women must escape bad relationships." Still, she wouldn't mind if life brought her a new romance. "I'm free now," she says.
