A local lawyer who was publicly scolded after he showed detainees a photo of a “scantily clad” woman before he made an “obscene hand gesture” toward a probation officer has lost his appeal.

Attorney Michael Cerulli was publicly reprimanded by the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers for his reported “unprofessional and demeaning treatment” of a probation officer in the Chelsea District Court lock-up.

Cerulli, a sole practitioner with Lynn offices, appealed the public admonishment to the Supreme Judicial Court — and the SJC affirmed the punishment in a ruling released on Monday.

The case goes back to an incident in November of 2019, when Cerulli was working in Chelsea District Court as an assigned duty attorney. Cerulli reportedly went into the basement lock-up area and was “sort of bantering back and forth” with detainees.

He then reportedly took his phone out, found an image, and showed it to detainees. Meanwhile, a probation officer nearby said she saw the photo on his phone.

“The hearing committee found that the image, or meme, that the respondent showed to the detainee depicted a scantily clad blond woman, wearing a bustier, thong underwear, and an off-the-shoulder fur jacket, descending a flight of stairs,” the ruling reads.

“Its caption stated, ‘Immigrants are bad,’ and below the picture are the words, ‘Unless they have nice legs, screw you for money, and do naked photo shoots with other women,’ ” the ruling states.

Cerulli claimed that the image was a meme depicting former First Lady Melania Trump.

While the lawyer showed the photo, the probation officer testified that he said, “That is nineteen,” which she believed referred to the age of the woman in the photograph, and “That’s why you need to get out of here.”

Cerulli’s version of the conversation was that the detainee said, “Girls like that like guys like you in suits,” and he replied, “So get out of there, get yourself a job, get yourself a suit, and maybe you can get a girl like that,” and they laughed together.

The probation officer testified that she felt very uncomfortable and did not know how to address the situation, but she wanted to say something. As she left the area, she glared at the respondent and said, “I believe you might want to be a little more discreet next time, that was disgusting and inappropriate.”

Cerulli, standing toward the rear of the lockup area, appeared to say something in response. He covered his mouth with his hand and made a face, “feigning shame or embarrassment.”

He eventually moved to the front of the lock-up area, bantering briefly with the detainees as he passed them.

“As he left, he made a gesture with his left hand mimicking a form of male masturbation,” the ruling reads. “The probation officer had left the area by this time and did not see this gesture.”

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The probation officer told her supervisor what happened. Her supervisor called the chief court officer, and the probation officer explained to him and, later, to the First Justice of the Chelsea District Court what had happened.

Court officers then escorted Cerulli from the courthouse. After an investigation, the Committee for Public Counsel Services notified Cerulli that he was “temporarily suspended… from any further assignments or duty days” out of the Chelsea District Court, and that any of his open cases in that court would be reassigned.

Then he was publicly reprimanded, which led to the SJC appeal ruling on Monday. He argued that a public reprimand was “markedly disparate from the sanction imposed in comparable cases and that it is not supported by the evidence in this case.” But the SJC disagreed.

“The record supports the single justice’s description of the misconduct in this case: having ‘introduced a sexually suggestive image into a courthouse lock-up to potential clients’ while in the presence of a probation officer, the respondent then ‘openly belittled’ the officer ‘with a mock apology and obscene hand gesture’ when she objected,” the SJC wrote.

“By displaying the image to the detainees and then crudely dismissing her objection in front of them, he engaged in disrespectful, demeaning conduct toward an employee of the judiciary of a kind plainly inviting disrespect toward her from the detainees as well, thereby interfering with her ability to do her job,” the court added. “In these circumstances, imposing a public reprimand was not ‘markedly disparate’ from a comparable sanction.”

Cerulli also argued that his right to free speech under the First Amendment was violated. He asserted that he and the detainees were discussing the immigration policies of the federal administration then in office and that the image, along with its caption, was a satirical comment on that issue.

“The respondent is not being disciplined for expressing political views,” the SJC wrote. “As set forth above, the discipline is for his demeaning and disrespectful conduct toward a probation officer in front of detainees at a court house, while he was acting in his capacity as an attorney. The single justice did not violate his constitutional rights by imposing a public reprimand.”