Mark Kernes
he/him
Until his retirement in mid-2019, Mark Kernes was the Senior Editor and Chief Legal Analyst for AVN Media Network, which publishes Adult Video News (AVN), the primary trade magazine of the adult entertainment industry, and avn.com, which reports daily on news and events that may affect that industry. A graduate of New York University in 1972, Kernes worked as a freelance “court reporter” (stenographer) in and around the criminal and civil courts in the Philadelphia and Media, Pa. areas for 19 years before leaving that profession to work full-time for AVN. In the course of his employment, Kernes has attended and reported on a number of obscenity and other free-speech-related court hearings, and has gone “undercover” to and reported on various religio-conservative events such as the Values Voter Summits and the Conservative Political Action Conferences. For more than a decade, Kernes was a member of the Board of Directors of the Free Speech Coalition, the adult industry trade organization, and is its first Director Emeritis, and has lobbied on the industry’s behalf in Sacramento, Calif. He is currently working on a collection of his AVN articles for publication in book form.