In Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies, simple denial is defined as "a denial that the event occurred, was bad, or that the entity /rhetor was connected to the event" (Benoit, 1995; Len-Ríos & Benoit, 2004). Benoit says this strategy can be applied when an organization believes it has done nothing wrong. In this case, the organization will deny the crisis, its involvement in the crisis, or that the crisis was harmful to others. The second variant, blame shifting, is where one organization decides to place responsibility for its actions on another. Within this form of denial there is a third variant called separation. To use the separation strategy, an organization must separate from the defendant and demonstrate that the defendant acted on his or her own initiative, without authority, in order to preserve the organization's property.