Reception
The series received positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, it holds a 78% approval rating with an average rating of 6.5 out of 10, based on 60 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Donald Sutherland delivers a powerful turn as the titular Getty in Trust, yet another telling of the affluent family's saga." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the series a score of 67 out of 100 based on 24 critics.
Matt Zoller Seitz, reviewing for the pop-culture website Vulture, called the show a "decadent true-crime with an acidic sense of humor" that "alternates satire, drama, kookiness, and shocking violence." USA Today complimented the quality of the casting, noting that "Sutherland is predictably solid, but Fraser is the surprise, in what's perhaps his big comeback vehicle." It was also described as "zippy and fast-paced," with a "heightened and stylish feeling." Brendan Fraser's performance as James Fletcher Chace has also received praise from critics; considering his long hiatus from film acting and retreat from celebrity, his role was welcomed as a successful comeback, with TV Guide humorously declaring it the start of a "Brenaissance".
On March 16, 2018, it was reported that Ariadne Getty, John Paul Getty III's sister, was considering legal action against FX and the producers of the series. Her attorney Martin Singer released a statement calling the series a "wildly sensationalized false portrayal" of the Getty family and that "[i]t is ironic that you have titled your television series Trust. 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." In the statement, Singer went on to explain how his client objected to the alleged portrayal of the family as having played a role in the kidnapping themselves and that he considered it to be defamatory to falsely accuse someone of a crime.
Simon Beaufoy has stated that his decision to depict Getty as complicit in his own kidnapping was justified by his research into the matter, though none of the written biographies explicitly reach that conclusion. He stated that while reading Charles Fox's 2013 biography of Paul III, Uncommon Youth, "It became clear, reading in between the lines ... that he actually kidnapped himself". According to his theory, the plot then spiraled out of Paul's control when his grandfather refused to pay, causing several of his captors to sell their interest to a syndicate of more ruthless Mafiosi.
