The rapper and music producer Sean “Diddy” Combs appeared nervous as jury selection began in his highly anticipated sex trafficking trial at a federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan on Monday. The judge, who plans to seat his jury by Wednesday afternoon, did not yet get to the voir dire part of the selection process, when the attorneys get to question the candidates and strike the ones they don’t want deciding the case. The thorough jury selection process will resume on Tuesday.     

“I’m sorry, your honor, I’m a little nervous today,” the disgraced music mogul told the presiding Judge, Arun Subramanian. Mr. Combs asked for a bathroom break after about 90 minutes into the first round of questioning. 

If found guilty, Mr. Combs faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. The five-count indictment includes one charge of racketeering conspiracy, two charges of sex trafficking, and two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution. Federal prosecutors allege that Mr. Combs engaged in sexual abuse over the course of two decades against women and men, coercing them into drug use and sex marathons to fulfill his carnal desires. The music mogul has pleaded not guilty to all charges and insists that all sexual encounters were consensual. In a pre-trial hearing, Mr. Agnifilo told the judge that his client was a “swinger.”

More than 600 New Yorkers had been called to the Southern District of New York court last week and asked to fill out a questionnaire. Then, on Monday morning, the judge called 50 jurors into the courtroom and asked them an additional 14 questions. The candidates had to jot down if they would answer any of those questions with “yes.” 

The questions largely centered on personal experiences the prospective jurors — or people close to them — had with sexual abuse, domestic violence, drug use, and addiction. They also concerned run-ins with the law, and their personal beliefs on sex workers, firearms, infidelity, and traumatic events. They were also asked about their taste in music. 

After reading the charges, and the additional questions, the group was led into another courtroom, and then the judge began calling them one by one into the main courtroom, to see if anyone could be excused by cause, meaning for a reason he deemed valid to dismiss them from their jury duty. 

Mr. Combs, who wore a navy sweater over a white-collar shirt, was taking notes, and would, every time he didn’t appear to like a juror, turn to his attorneys and give them a stern look. His gray hair, and the gray goatee, which he seems to be growing, gave him the look of a more mature man, a far cry from the flashy fur coats and sunglasses he used to rock when he was promoting the image of the self-proclaimed “Bad Boy For Life.” 

Ironically, just across the East River, the ultra-exclusive Met Gala, where Mr. Combs was a major presence for years, was getting under way Monday afternoon. This year’s theme is “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” and Mr. Combs’s “influence on the current exhibition is undeniable,” according to the  Times. 

During Monday’s proceedings, Mr. Combs appeared extremely unnerved, turning his head from left to right, as if he were looking for help, when one prospective juror, an older man, began telling the judge that his wife, who used to be an attorney, took a deposition of Mr. Combs, “30 years ago … when he [the defendant] was a promoter and there was a stampede” at a concert. “People died,” he told the judge. “People rushed to the door and got crushed.” 

Nine people died in the notorious City College stampede in 1991, which took place at an overcrowded charity basketball game that a young Mr. Combs and the rapper Heavy D were promoting.  

The prospective juror’s wife, who does not work as an attorney any more and is now a teacher, the man said, “did not have a positive opinion” of Mr. Combs, who was not ultimately not held liable for the deaths at the event (no criminal charges were ever filed).  

Even though the man insisted that he could be impartial because he himself didn’t “know much about” the case, the judge excused him. He had also shared a personal story of an adopted daughter, who had been sexually abused by a stepfather, before she came to live with him and his wife. “She joined our family about six years ago,” the man said, “she came from foster care, and has a lot of trauma.” 

There were several other prospective jurors who shared personal stories of sexual abuse. A 68-year-old woman, who lives alone in Manhattan, said she was molested by a dentist when she was 16 years old. 

Her parents, the woman admitted shyly, could not pay a bill and sent her to work off the debt at the dentist’s office. The dentist then “kissed and fondled me,” the woman said. She never reported the incident, but she did seek therapy and told the judge, “I have become more alert,” regarding victimhood, insisting she could be fair. “Grossly inappropriate behavior,” she said, “happens all over the world.” She added, “I think it made me a better person overall. … Predators are frequently unaware. … I don’t think I would side with anybody.”

The lead defense attorney, Marc Agnifilo tried in vain to get her dismissed, but the judge kept her in the pool. 

Another woman, who worried Mr. Combs and his defense team, was a 55-year-old photo-producer who lives in Manhattan and works at HBO, whose parent streaming service, Max, recently released the unflattering docuseries “The Fall of Diddy.” 

On top of working for a network that, as Mr. Agnifilo put it, spoke “negatively” about his client, the woman had also experienced sexual assault when she was teenager. She and her sister, she said, were molested by a cousin in their family when they were 8 to 10 years old. 

“Both my sister and I have been to therapy,” the woman said, “and it’s been put behind us.” She admitted that she may react “emotionally” to certain testimony, but said she was a rational person and could judge the case impartially.  

“I think I feel empathy for the person,” she added, referring to the alleged victims, “I think emotionally I’ll feel something but I am also a very rational person. I think I can separate … the two … in that case.”

Then there was a possible panelist who works in marketing  at the publishing house Simon & Schuster, which is preparing to release a memoir by the singer “Al B. Sure,” who was married to Mr. Combs’s late ex-girlfriend, Kim Porter, with whom he has three children. The defense passed the judge a follow-up question, which asked the panelist how the company paid her. She told the judge that she received a monthly salary but that her bonus at the end of the year was tied to the book sales. The judge excused her.

One woman, who passed the first round, was 30 years old and from Westchester County, north of the city. She admitted that she was caught shoplifting, a long time ago, on a visit to Universal Studios, at Harry Potter World. She did not have to go to trial, and got off with a fine, and a penalty that she could not visit Universal Studios for a year. When asked if she had recently seen any news coverage of Mr. Combs’s case, she said she had liked a video by a comedian who had made fun of the 1,000 bottles of baby oil the FBI found when they raided Mr. Combs’s estates in Los Angeles and Miami. “I may have liked a post on Instagram when they went into his house they found a bunch of baby oil,” the woman confessed. 

Another female, who used to work as a “peace officer” in a homeless shelter, and now works with mental patients at a hospital, told the judge that her ex-husband had served 21 years in prison for attempted murder. “The incident happened in Brooklyn,” she said, “My stepson was getting bullied. So he [her ex-husband] came to the block with a couple of his friends and then there was gun fire.” The woman was worried about missing her son’s graduation in May, and her daughter’s birthday party later in the summer. The trial is expected to last eight to 10 weeks. 

The judge managed to question 32 panelists, of which he excused 13 and kept 19 New Yorkers, from Manhattan, Westchester, and from the Bronx (the areas that comprise the Southern District). In the afternoon, he sat these 19 into the jury box and asked about their professions, their marital status, their education, and also about their preferred music. The woman who was molested by her dentist said she liked to listen to Paul Simon, even though “I don’t listen to music lately, because I am so exhausted from work.”  Someone else liked to listen to video game scores, many people said they liked classic rock music, and a few people mentioned they listened to hip-hop from the 1990s, the time when Mr. Combs was a king of the charts. 

On Tuesday, the questioning by the judge will resume. Once he has about 45 jurors who have been screened for cause dismissal reasons, the voir dire will begin, and then the attorneys get to use their strikes. 

At the end of the day, Mr. Combs made a hand sign to a music producer, who was sitting in the gallery. The man, Charluccie Finny, had described himself to reporters last week as Mr. Combs’s god-brother. On Monday, it appeared that Mr. Combs lifted up seven fingers, perhaps indicating he had found seven jurors, or would strike seven. 

His defense attorney, Brian Steel, who is known for representing the rap artist Young Thug in Atlanta, asked the judge if his team could enter the courthouse at 7:30 a.m. so they could discuss the case with the defendant before the jury selection would resume. The judge said that if the marshals would be willing to accommodate it, he would have no objections to the request.