She was licensed in 2021 at 51, worked under three brokers, and stopped at the end of 2024. The license expired the following July. Most of the rest of her public file is a court case from 1997 and six pages in a magazine.
Pietra Dawn Cherniak was licensed as a California real estate salesperson on July 7, 2021, at 51. Seven weeks later she signed on at Pinnacle Estate Properties in Woodland Hills, the first of three San Fernando Valley brokerages she worked for. It was the first job of hers documented anywhere since she posed for Playboy in January 1998.
She was married to Billy Bob Thornton from 1993 to 1997. Their sons are 33 and 32.
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What the license record shows
The California Department of Real Estate holds the file. Cherniak took out license number 02134660, the salesperson credential rather than the broker one, and worked under three responsible brokers.
| Brokerage | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| Pinnacle Estate Properties | August 25 to November 29, 2021 |
| Pritchett Realty Corp | December 2, 2021 to February 12, 2023 |
| Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage | May 11, 2023 to December 30, 2024 |
A salesperson in California cannot take clients without a broker behind them, so her working period ended on December 30, 2024, when the Coldwell Banker affiliation closed. The license itself expired on July 6, 2025 and has not been renewed. The department records no disciplinary action against her.
She had advertised the number herself. An X account under the name Pietra (Cherniak) Thornton listed it publicly and described her as a Malibu realtor.
Santa Monica, then Thornton
Cherniak was born in Santa Monica on February 9, 1970. She is 56. She is often described as a Russian model, a claim no record of her birth supports, and no account of her modeling work before the Playboy shoot has been published.
She met Thornton outside a Los Angeles restaurant in the early 1990s. People says 1992. Playboy, writing in January 1998 with her cooperation, said 1991. They married on February 18, 1993, when she was 23 and he was 37.
William Langston Thornton was born that June. Harry James followed in June 1994. Harry said in 2022 that he had been homeschooled and that the family stayed in a lot while he was growing up.
Her name is in the Sling Blade credits under special thanks, next to Thornton’s mother Virginia.
Eighteen days
Sling Blade opened that November and Cherniak went with him to most of what followed. Photo agencies have her at the premiere on November 17, 1996, at Elizabeth Taylor’s 65th birthday party in Los Angeles on February 16, 1997, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards later that month, and at the Writers Guild Awards in March.
Thornton won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Shrine Auditorium on March 24, 1997, and lost Best Actor the same evening. Getty photographers caught his wife kissing him backstage.
Eighteen days later, on April 11, she filed for divorce and asked the court for a restraining order. In papers reported by People, she described being hit, pushed, punched and bitten over the previous year, sometimes in front of the boys, who were 3 and 2.
Thornton denied it. “I never exhibited the behavior she’s accusing me of,” he said in a statement.
That June a judge issued restraining orders against both of them, after Thornton told the court he was the one who had been threatened.
The lawsuit with no ruling
Cherniak sued her estranged husband on September 10, 1997. Gloria Allred represented her and gave reporters copies of the complaint in Santa Monica later that month. It alleged that Thornton had stalked and assaulted her during the marriage, that he had punched, choked and bitten her, and that she had feared for her life. She asked for unspecified damages, and the Associated Press covered the filing.
How the case ended is not in the public record. Thornton was never charged over any of it.
Six pages in Playboy
Playboy ran six pages of her in January 1998, photographed by Stephen Wayda, under the headline “Sling Babe.” Inside the spread the magazine printed the Oscar night picture of the two of them. She told Playboy she had been frightened of her husband that evening, and that once he lost Best Actor she knew how the rest of the night would go.
She called the pictorial her own award.
“This is my Oscar.”
She has not given an interview since.
After the divorce
Thornton married Angelina Jolie in 2000 and divorced her in 2003. In a Playboy interview that May he described Cherniak as one of his closest friends and said the boys were at his house nearly as much as at hers. Harry said in 2022 that Jolie had taken them camping and still sent him Christmas presents.
On October 7, 2004, Thornton collected the 2,265th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Cherniak is in the photographs with William and Harry, standing beside Thornton’s mother Virginia, his girlfriend Connie Angland, and Angland and Thornton’s two week old daughter Bella.
Angland worked as an animatronics engineer and effects artist before she met Thornton, with credits on Men in Black and Planet of the Apes. Profiles of Cherniak sometimes list that work as hers. It is not.
Cherniak kept showing up at Los Angeles events into 2006: a video game awards show in July 2005, a denim store opening in Hollywood that August, a film premiere at Grauman’s Chinese on May 2, 2006, and the Lupus LA gala at the Beverly Hills Hotel nine days after that.
In May 2008 her sister, Elysabeth Cherniak, went to police accusing Thornton of years of harassment. The New York Daily News and TMZ both covered the claims, Thornton’s representatives denied them, and no charges followed.
Where things stand
Harry James Thornton sells luxury property out of a Beverly Hills office on Wilshire Boulevard and names his mother in his own agent biography, calling her a former model. His daughters were born in 2013 and 2018, which makes Cherniak a grandmother twice over.
Figures for her net worth circulate widely. None of them trace back to anything.
What Cherniak does now has not been reported. The most recent document carrying her name is a real estate license that expired on July 6, 2025.
