When director Ridley Scott adapted the Getty-kidnapping saga in last year’s All the Money in the World, he and screenwriter David Scarpa cast teenage Paul Getty as the clear victim—a pawn in peril brought on by his grandfather’s fortune. But FX’s Trust—which has 10 episodes’ worth of breathing room—portrays a far more complex picture. As Trust screenwriter Simon Beaufoy teased reporters earlier this year, “The truth is a complicated word isn’t it?”

Trust’s third episode “La Dolce Vita,” which airs Sunday, depicts 16-year-old Paul (Harris Dickinson) as an aspiring artist living a bohemian lifestyle in Rome with his girlfriend Martine and her identical-twin sister Jutta. Despite his family name, Paul is broke—he has not come into the titular family trust—and hawks paintings at a local bistro in exchange for dinner. While Paul is content struggling, his friends go behind his back and use his family name as collateral to fund their drug habit. When Paul finds out, he is heartbroken and unable to borrow the $6,000 he suddenly owes to a web of shady characters. The episode posits that Paul helped stage his own kidnapping to collect a ransom and pay off the debt.

Last month, the Getty family preemptively refuted this controversial narrative—with Paul’s surviving sister, Ariadne Getty, threatening to sue FX over the series.

“It is ironic that you have titled your television series Trust,” wrote Getty’s lawyer, Marty Singer, in a sternly worded letter to FX. “More fitting titles would be Lies or Mistrust since the defamatory story it tells about the Gettys’ colluding in the kidnapping is false and misleading, and viewers rightly ought to mistrust it.”

But screenwriter Simon Beaufoy has claimed that his belief—that Paul was initially complicit in the kidnapping—is rooted in research.

“The more research I did, the more I realized [Paul] arranged his own kidnapping,” Beaufoy told The New York Times this month. “It was a huge attention-seeking device; ‘they’ll pay because they love me.’ It became an extraordinary metaphor for the third generation [of this family] saying, pay some attention to me, show me some love.”

“There’s a very good book written by Charles Fox, [Uncommon Youth: The Gilded Life and Tragic Times of J. Paul Getty III], who interviewed everybody in the family, including little Paul Getty and Martine and Jutta, his girlfriend and her twin sister,” Beaufoy told press this January. “It became clear, reading in between the lines . . . that he actually kidnapped himself . . . Like all the Gettys, they were multi-millionaires but couldn’t pay for a drink because they had no cash. And he’d run up a debt, quite a large debt, and couldn’t repay it . . . The only thing he felt he could use was his name as a Getty. So he cooked up a kidnap plot.”

What is irrefutable is that the kidnapping stakes escalated when Getty’s grandfather refused to pay the kidnappers, explaining to reporters at the time, “I have 14 grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.” The old businessman—suspecting that the kidnapping was a hoax—waited out his adversaries. And Paul’s kidnappers grew so frustrated over the ensuing five months of negotiations that some sold their share in the scion to Calabrian-mob members. The Mafia took more gruesome measures to ensure it received payment—even slicing off the boy’s ear and mailing it back to his family to prove the kidnapping was serious.